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.
19 September 2010
16 September 2010
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.
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.
12 September 2010
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.
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.
5 September 2010
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.
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.
23 August 2010
Genesis sermons
A couple of interesting sites with sermons on Genesis.
Stillwater RPC, and
some talks from a conference on creation in about 2000.
I don't agree with everything said on these sites, but there's plenty to work through with profit, IMO.
Dr. Pipa is one of the speakers at the conference, and in dealing with Kline's redigestion of the 'framework hypothesis' makes what I think is a fairly silly suggestiong that the thorns, etc that come to pester humanity on the land were seeded before the fall by God in knowledge of the fall. I think this is speculative and unnecssary given the drama that the fall would impose on the creation as God moved away from live-sustaining relationship with humanity.
Stillwater RPC, and
some talks from a conference on creation in about 2000.
I don't agree with everything said on these sites, but there's plenty to work through with profit, IMO.
Dr. Pipa is one of the speakers at the conference, and in dealing with Kline's redigestion of the 'framework hypothesis' makes what I think is a fairly silly suggestiong that the thorns, etc that come to pester humanity on the land were seeded before the fall by God in knowledge of the fall. I think this is speculative and unnecssary given the drama that the fall would impose on the creation as God moved away from live-sustaining relationship with humanity.
22 August 2010
Samuel
The text for our sermon at church this morning was from 1 Samuel 2. I was particularly taken with the pastoral reference, and implications of 1 Samueal 2:8:
The dependence of many passages on Scripture on God's being creator is often, I think, overlooked in discussions of origins.
I just wonder how people would have confidence in God, if they really understood there to be a great gulf of the unknown standing between his word and us? A gulf which does not seem to be present in Genesis 1.
See also my post '13' on this.
He raises the poor from the dust,
He lifts the needy from the ash heap
To make them sit with nobles,
And inherit a seat of honor;
For the pillars of the earth are the LORD'S,
And He set the world on them.
The dependence of many passages on Scripture on God's being creator is often, I think, overlooked in discussions of origins.
I just wonder how people would have confidence in God, if they really understood there to be a great gulf of the unknown standing between his word and us? A gulf which does not seem to be present in Genesis 1.
See also my post '13' on this.
21 August 2010
Framework theory
From Dr. Albert Mohler speaking at the Ligoner Ministries 2010 annual conference:
The idea that Genesis is merely literary has to be rejected out of hand as in direct contradiction to our understanding of the Bible as the inerrant and infallible word of God. That option for any credible and faithful evangelical Christian must be taken off the table. So then, we are left with the framework theory, held by some prominent evangelicals, but, I would argue, one of the least defensible positions when we understand that it is based upon the assumption not only that there may be a very long period of time that is involved and incorporated in Genesis 1 and the sequence of the days, but actually that the sequence does not matter! It simply is not credible, at least to me, 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 the direct content that he has given us within the text.
It certainly seems by any common sense natural reading of the text that it is making historical and sequential claims.
The idea that Genesis is merely literary has to be rejected out of hand as in direct contradiction to our understanding of the Bible as the inerrant and infallible word of God. That option for any credible and faithful evangelical Christian must be taken off the table. So then, we are left with the framework theory, held by some prominent evangelicals, but, I would argue, one of the least defensible positions when we understand that it is based upon the assumption not only that there may be a very long period of time that is involved and incorporated in Genesis 1 and the sequence of the days, but actually that the sequence does not matter! It simply is not credible, at least to me, 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 the direct content that he has given us within the text.
It certainly seems by any common sense natural reading of the text that it is making historical and sequential claims.
19 August 2010
Challies on evolution
Tim Challies, whom I've recently added to my blog roll, has this nice post on evolution and Christian thought.
18 August 2010
No chance
Recently reading Douglas Kelly's "Creation and Change" I was browsing through his long list of NT citations of the Genesis creation account, and, of course, came to John 1:3: "All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being" (in Bulgarian, this is: Всичко това чрез Него стана; и без Него не e станало нищо от това, което е станало, if you really must know).
Here, I think, the notion of chance being operative in forming the creation as we know it, and as described in Genesis 1 (that is, formed by God in the categories we know, and he states) is put paid to: can't happen. Because, if chance operated, and that is the mainstay of contemporary evolutionary dogma, then some things came into being apart from Him. Not on, according to John.
And this is an exemplary statement as to the importance of the detail of the physical creation for our knowledge of self, the cosmos and God: unlike ancient Greek and Eastern religious view points, the physical world is of substantial moment; it is not relegated to a lower order of reality, because it was made by God in love as the place we stand in relationship to him, and it was made purposively by him as this setting for fellowship. It becomes ludicrous to claim that God 'used' evolution to create the world we see, because this demands that God stood back from the world of purpose to allow an 'interregnum' of chance to operate and do what it does (that is, allowing things to come into creation apart from him). Not only is this teleological nonsense, but it categorically defeats the central tenet of evolution. Chance! God 'used' chance for purpose? Oxymoronic (or just plain ordinary moronic).
No. He tells us that everything came into being through Christ, the only mediator between God and man, the word of creation; with no mysterious or occult principle intervening in the stream of relationship between God and man, commenced with God's creative acts.
Here, I think, the notion of chance being operative in forming the creation as we know it, and as described in Genesis 1 (that is, formed by God in the categories we know, and he states) is put paid to: can't happen. Because, if chance operated, and that is the mainstay of contemporary evolutionary dogma, then some things came into being apart from Him. Not on, according to John.
And this is an exemplary statement as to the importance of the detail of the physical creation for our knowledge of self, the cosmos and God: unlike ancient Greek and Eastern religious view points, the physical world is of substantial moment; it is not relegated to a lower order of reality, because it was made by God in love as the place we stand in relationship to him, and it was made purposively by him as this setting for fellowship. It becomes ludicrous to claim that God 'used' evolution to create the world we see, because this demands that God stood back from the world of purpose to allow an 'interregnum' of chance to operate and do what it does (that is, allowing things to come into creation apart from him). Not only is this teleological nonsense, but it categorically defeats the central tenet of evolution. Chance! God 'used' chance for purpose? Oxymoronic (or just plain ordinary moronic).
No. He tells us that everything came into being through Christ, the only mediator between God and man, the word of creation; with no mysterious or occult principle intervening in the stream of relationship between God and man, commenced with God's creative acts.
16 August 2010
Evolutionary Evangelist
One result of entertaining evolution as a real explanation of origins (even if artificially conjoined to Christian faith via so-called 'theistic evolution') is described by Al Mohler on his blog. It jetisons utterly the God of the Bible. Is this where the neo-evangelicals are taking us with moves such as the text-denying 'framework' hypothesis?
15 August 2010
13
Recently I was invited to a business meeting on the 13th of the month. The person who invited me apologised laughingly for the date...for some '13' is considered 'unlucky'.
As it happens, I don't run my life on luck; I seek to live in dependence upon the creator and our redeemer. Luck just doesn't enter into it!
During a walk I was musing on this and wondering at the difference between myself as a Christian, with a certainty of faith in God and one without this who allowed themselves to be dogged by 'luck', omens, and similar superstitious rubbish.
I thought that one of the pillars of faith was that God who created, who spoke the cosmos into being, relieved me of the futility of unsettling reliance on the fates (luck).
But, I wondered as to whether this certainty would be as easily accessible if I thought that the Bible didn't tell us what happened when God created, and instead told us what didn't happen, then expected us to use this non-information to form a faith that God did what he didn't tell us.
I pondered that I could easily dismiss superstitious ideas about the number '13' because I knew that such things had no place in the cosmos, as the cosmos is mere creation of the one who saves. But could I have this comfortable position if I believed that God was not able to communicate to us his soverignty over creation (the process). There would still be a mystery, were there other factors that could influence me? How would I know?
But it is not so. God has communicated his creative work, and what creation is, by telling us in detail what constitutes the creative sequence and he tells us in terms that are congruent with the world we live in. Time then in creation, is time that we can connect to and make sense of. The actions of bringing things into existence are the things we see about us, at least in kind, the events are events that make sense to us as being about the features of the world we now see and experience. It is this world that God made, not some other world, not a world that he couldn't describe to us as co-participants in the 'life' of the cosmos. He as creator, we as its custodians and denizens.
If the creation, its account and our experience of it did not line up; one leg of our certain confidence in God would be gone, and the other, the resurrection, would be unstable. Thus, Hebrews 11:3
As it happens, I don't run my life on luck; I seek to live in dependence upon the creator and our redeemer. Luck just doesn't enter into it!
During a walk I was musing on this and wondering at the difference between myself as a Christian, with a certainty of faith in God and one without this who allowed themselves to be dogged by 'luck', omens, and similar superstitious rubbish.
I thought that one of the pillars of faith was that God who created, who spoke the cosmos into being, relieved me of the futility of unsettling reliance on the fates (luck).
But, I wondered as to whether this certainty would be as easily accessible if I thought that the Bible didn't tell us what happened when God created, and instead told us what didn't happen, then expected us to use this non-information to form a faith that God did what he didn't tell us.
I pondered that I could easily dismiss superstitious ideas about the number '13' because I knew that such things had no place in the cosmos, as the cosmos is mere creation of the one who saves. But could I have this comfortable position if I believed that God was not able to communicate to us his soverignty over creation (the process). There would still be a mystery, were there other factors that could influence me? How would I know?
But it is not so. God has communicated his creative work, and what creation is, by telling us in detail what constitutes the creative sequence and he tells us in terms that are congruent with the world we live in. Time then in creation, is time that we can connect to and make sense of. The actions of bringing things into existence are the things we see about us, at least in kind, the events are events that make sense to us as being about the features of the world we now see and experience. It is this world that God made, not some other world, not a world that he couldn't describe to us as co-participants in the 'life' of the cosmos. He as creator, we as its custodians and denizens.
If the creation, its account and our experience of it did not line up; one leg of our certain confidence in God would be gone, and the other, the resurrection, would be unstable. Thus, Hebrews 11:3
12 August 2010
Death Penalty
I recently saw an article on the Creation website that set out to answer the question as to why God 'imposed' the death penalty on Adam for his sin.
As one could expect from a fairly theologically traditional organisation (I generally agree with their theological position in its dependence on the Bible, but I find that some traditionalists have allowed, I think, cultural influences to bend their theology; perhaps this is exemplified by such things as culturally traditional views of relationships with women, church order, and an overly forensic approach to theology).
The way Russell Grigg puts it in his article, it sounds as if the 'death penalty' is imposed in a discretionary manner because a law had been broken. But not so. The law was not given until many centuries after the fall. So, what happened?
God made Adam in his image, to be in a way a counterpart to God such that real relationship could be between the two: creator and creature. For real relationships, the imageness would need to include a real will, real capability for decision making to form a real relationship, and not just to mimic a relationship. God was, to adopt our language, taking a risk. But I'm sure he knew the possible outcomes and had them all 'managed' (as we like to say that we do with risk these days!).
The tree was presented to man as God setting the footing of the relationship: it was a genuine relationship, not an orchestrated one. Man could remain in a relationship of life, or turn from the relationship and cease to participate with God; that is, man would reject the one who had in himself 'life-source' as the foundation for the work of 'subduing' the creation (living within and caring for it, and not dominated by it). He would here live in life, but rejecting God, he would now live in rejection of the life-giver and so, in the struture of it would inherit death, purely on his own choice.
The 'death penalty' arrived because Adam choose to separate from life and 'know' in his own life-experience the evil of choosing 'not-life'.
As one could expect from a fairly theologically traditional organisation (I generally agree with their theological position in its dependence on the Bible, but I find that some traditionalists have allowed, I think, cultural influences to bend their theology; perhaps this is exemplified by such things as culturally traditional views of relationships with women, church order, and an overly forensic approach to theology).
The way Russell Grigg puts it in his article, it sounds as if the 'death penalty' is imposed in a discretionary manner because a law had been broken. But not so. The law was not given until many centuries after the fall. So, what happened?
God made Adam in his image, to be in a way a counterpart to God such that real relationship could be between the two: creator and creature. For real relationships, the imageness would need to include a real will, real capability for decision making to form a real relationship, and not just to mimic a relationship. God was, to adopt our language, taking a risk. But I'm sure he knew the possible outcomes and had them all 'managed' (as we like to say that we do with risk these days!).
The tree was presented to man as God setting the footing of the relationship: it was a genuine relationship, not an orchestrated one. Man could remain in a relationship of life, or turn from the relationship and cease to participate with God; that is, man would reject the one who had in himself 'life-source' as the foundation for the work of 'subduing' the creation (living within and caring for it, and not dominated by it). He would here live in life, but rejecting God, he would now live in rejection of the life-giver and so, in the struture of it would inherit death, purely on his own choice.
The 'death penalty' arrived because Adam choose to separate from life and 'know' in his own life-experience the evil of choosing 'not-life'.
Moltmann retrospective
...the human being perceives himself, not through reflection and introspection, but in the experiences of the history of the covenant and the promises of his God....The human being has really no substance in himself; he is a history. That is why the anthropology of the Old Testament does not deal so much in definitions as in narratives. (p.257)
These narratives are about the real world; the world we stand in and the world God spoke into existence which God sets in our history by the thorough chronological markers he provides in Genesis. Time, history, is not unimportant in the interplay of God and his creation, it is of the essence because it is in history: what really happened; that we are told who we are, who God is and what is the relationship.
The world we stand in and the world we talk about are the same world. They are not the two different worlds that many theologians, JM included, seem to entertain, but are unified as the only setting of covenant. The creation account brings together what our imagination might want to drive apart, and tells us that there is no other world that is, in our compass, more real than the one created, in which connection is made with God. Creation shows the joint history between God and his creation (us), with the history is established in the facts: the details of action, time and place, which as JM tells us on p. 73 has no corresponding human analogy; so claims that the creation account are parabolic in some way must go by the wayside.
If it is parablic, if there is something else, then God has not revealed to us the basis for our communion that has any meaning in the real world (the only world we know), and its provenance is made uncertain by the mists of unimaginably long periods of time and the uncertainty of mysticism (which is what any parabolic view of the Genesis account results in) removing from our historical experience God's actions and their results in the physical world we know.
These narratives are about the real world; the world we stand in and the world God spoke into existence which God sets in our history by the thorough chronological markers he provides in Genesis. Time, history, is not unimportant in the interplay of God and his creation, it is of the essence because it is in history: what really happened; that we are told who we are, who God is and what is the relationship.
The world we stand in and the world we talk about are the same world. They are not the two different worlds that many theologians, JM included, seem to entertain, but are unified as the only setting of covenant. The creation account brings together what our imagination might want to drive apart, and tells us that there is no other world that is, in our compass, more real than the one created, in which connection is made with God. Creation shows the joint history between God and his creation (us), with the history is established in the facts: the details of action, time and place, which as JM tells us on p. 73 has no corresponding human analogy; so claims that the creation account are parabolic in some way must go by the wayside.
If it is parablic, if there is something else, then God has not revealed to us the basis for our communion that has any meaning in the real world (the only world we know), and its provenance is made uncertain by the mists of unimaginably long periods of time and the uncertainty of mysticism (which is what any parabolic view of the Genesis account results in) removing from our historical experience God's actions and their results in the physical world we know.
9 August 2010
Moltmann wrap up
A quick wrap of my reading of God in Creation by Moltmann
Moltmann wonders around the topic in his ‘true-to-form’ fashion: its entertaining, but can catch the reader off guard, as he appears to head first in one direction, then in another.
His views on the biblical doctrine of creation are no different.
Reading earlier chapters, he sounds like a biblical literalist, for all the reasons that biblical literalists are convinced by: the simple meaning of the words used in their grammatical context. No surprise there! Moltmann doesn’t try to kid us with pointless arguments about ‘literary form’ or insult our intelligence by proposing that he doesn’t take a literal, but a literary view of the Genesis creation account (he thinks, of course, that there are two accounts). What he does is to effectively put the biblical account in a different world from this one, yet seeks to make the intersection between revelation (I’m not quite sure if he thinks it is revelation or by using the word ‘myth’ if he thinks its more like crafted stories that attempt to convey something other than what they appear to convey) and the world we live in.
He does this more in the chapter ‘The Evolution of Creation’ than any other. In this chapter he is clearly influenced by contemporary rhetoric about origins; and adopts the scientistic/materialist frame of reference in both an uncritical and unfounded manner.
Uncritical because he neglects the history of ideas of evolution, being rooted in religious view that axiomatically excludes both revelation and a divine revealer, and unfounded because he appears to be informed more by the static Aristotelian conception of the physical world (he calls it ‘nature’ giving away the pagan game) than the creation as provided for in the Bible, and as conceptualised by modern ‘creationists’.
So, for example, he seems to believe the Bible requires a level of ‘fixity’, perhaps of species, that it actually does not. Then argues against this pointing to the ‘openness’ that is shown by evolution. However, the openness to the future he seeks is in the Bible comprehensively, as the creation is a field of interplay between its own variations: such as within ‘kinds’ of organisms and human custodianship. But the variation within the creation has no discernable teleological import in and of itself, the only ‘openness’ to the future, to God’s life related to ours, is in that very arena of relationship; and in our fallen world, of our movement toward and away from God: toward in repentance, and away in pride!
The basic failing of his theology of creation, seems to me to be that he operates his theology on two planes: the plane of the idealist and the realist. The Bible consistently paints a realist picture of the world and events; it is only what happens that is important. What does not actually happen is of no value. Yet Moltmann must hold that the creation did not actually happen as accounted in the Bible, but evolution did and does, and the one can inform the other. But this is equivalent to claiming that a mere story that one is wealthy will influence a statement from one’s bank! Try using that approach when you go to buy a Lear Jet.
Not so, of course. If something has no reality, then it has no substance! The ‘didn’t happen’ cannot inform the ‘did happen’ in the same world conception; and the world conception of the Bible is of a physical (embodied) creation from the word of God to form the field where the relationship between God and man; his image-like-him, is made. Because our total experience is circumscribed by the real world of event and consequence delimited by space and time in an absolutist manner, and God’s revelation of creation is to link his word to that world, it is difficult to give any credibility to a conceptualisation of the revelation that disconnects it from the very structure that it is causally of a family with.
It might be argued that mediatorial mechanisms do not threaten disconnection, but I think that if any but the mediatorial role of Christ is given a place, they do. They immediately undo the relationship between God and his creation/God and humanity founded in the history between them; particularly where the idea of evolution is concerned as in recognition of the formulation of this idea, it runs a materialist view, not a personalist/supernatural one, and requires an uncomfortable and indeterminate grafting of the world of love, relationship and hope on to the world of value-free material randomness whose only teleological target is the heat death of the universe. The notion of evolution is not merely mediatorial between God’s speaking and the world we live in coming into being; rather, it re-founds the basis for thought and life; removing it from the personal, and replacing it with the material. It thusly provides an interpretive framework that turns its back on a personal creator (creator who is a person; person-ness and not material being basically real), leaving us with a dead-end explanation that dissipates the personal in material, reifying the reduction.
It thus says that there are two histories with which we contend and that impose their utterly different coordinate systems on our conceptualisation of the world. But, again, the very purpose of the creation account is to give us the coordinate system by which we can understand our relationship with our creator, and the place of the world as product of his loving word, albeit fallen as we have rejected that relationship. The world God made in history by his word is our world, the world in which we either seek him or not, and the world that he will redeem in re-creation! It is not another world that just happened over vast periods of de-personalising time by random processes.
But did God put in train the random processes? Of course, but they are processes of degradation, not creation!
Moltmann wonders around the topic in his ‘true-to-form’ fashion: its entertaining, but can catch the reader off guard, as he appears to head first in one direction, then in another.
His views on the biblical doctrine of creation are no different.
Reading earlier chapters, he sounds like a biblical literalist, for all the reasons that biblical literalists are convinced by: the simple meaning of the words used in their grammatical context. No surprise there! Moltmann doesn’t try to kid us with pointless arguments about ‘literary form’ or insult our intelligence by proposing that he doesn’t take a literal, but a literary view of the Genesis creation account (he thinks, of course, that there are two accounts). What he does is to effectively put the biblical account in a different world from this one, yet seeks to make the intersection between revelation (I’m not quite sure if he thinks it is revelation or by using the word ‘myth’ if he thinks its more like crafted stories that attempt to convey something other than what they appear to convey) and the world we live in.
He does this more in the chapter ‘The Evolution of Creation’ than any other. In this chapter he is clearly influenced by contemporary rhetoric about origins; and adopts the scientistic/materialist frame of reference in both an uncritical and unfounded manner.
Uncritical because he neglects the history of ideas of evolution, being rooted in religious view that axiomatically excludes both revelation and a divine revealer, and unfounded because he appears to be informed more by the static Aristotelian conception of the physical world (he calls it ‘nature’ giving away the pagan game) than the creation as provided for in the Bible, and as conceptualised by modern ‘creationists’.
So, for example, he seems to believe the Bible requires a level of ‘fixity’, perhaps of species, that it actually does not. Then argues against this pointing to the ‘openness’ that is shown by evolution. However, the openness to the future he seeks is in the Bible comprehensively, as the creation is a field of interplay between its own variations: such as within ‘kinds’ of organisms and human custodianship. But the variation within the creation has no discernable teleological import in and of itself, the only ‘openness’ to the future, to God’s life related to ours, is in that very arena of relationship; and in our fallen world, of our movement toward and away from God: toward in repentance, and away in pride!
The basic failing of his theology of creation, seems to me to be that he operates his theology on two planes: the plane of the idealist and the realist. The Bible consistently paints a realist picture of the world and events; it is only what happens that is important. What does not actually happen is of no value. Yet Moltmann must hold that the creation did not actually happen as accounted in the Bible, but evolution did and does, and the one can inform the other. But this is equivalent to claiming that a mere story that one is wealthy will influence a statement from one’s bank! Try using that approach when you go to buy a Lear Jet.
Not so, of course. If something has no reality, then it has no substance! The ‘didn’t happen’ cannot inform the ‘did happen’ in the same world conception; and the world conception of the Bible is of a physical (embodied) creation from the word of God to form the field where the relationship between God and man; his image-like-him, is made. Because our total experience is circumscribed by the real world of event and consequence delimited by space and time in an absolutist manner, and God’s revelation of creation is to link his word to that world, it is difficult to give any credibility to a conceptualisation of the revelation that disconnects it from the very structure that it is causally of a family with.
It might be argued that mediatorial mechanisms do not threaten disconnection, but I think that if any but the mediatorial role of Christ is given a place, they do. They immediately undo the relationship between God and his creation/God and humanity founded in the history between them; particularly where the idea of evolution is concerned as in recognition of the formulation of this idea, it runs a materialist view, not a personalist/supernatural one, and requires an uncomfortable and indeterminate grafting of the world of love, relationship and hope on to the world of value-free material randomness whose only teleological target is the heat death of the universe. The notion of evolution is not merely mediatorial between God’s speaking and the world we live in coming into being; rather, it re-founds the basis for thought and life; removing it from the personal, and replacing it with the material. It thusly provides an interpretive framework that turns its back on a personal creator (creator who is a person; person-ness and not material being basically real), leaving us with a dead-end explanation that dissipates the personal in material, reifying the reduction.
It thus says that there are two histories with which we contend and that impose their utterly different coordinate systems on our conceptualisation of the world. But, again, the very purpose of the creation account is to give us the coordinate system by which we can understand our relationship with our creator, and the place of the world as product of his loving word, albeit fallen as we have rejected that relationship. The world God made in history by his word is our world, the world in which we either seek him or not, and the world that he will redeem in re-creation! It is not another world that just happened over vast periods of de-personalising time by random processes.
But did God put in train the random processes? Of course, but they are processes of degradation, not creation!
7 August 2010
The Evolution of Creation
From this chapter in Moltmann, the following quote:
Moltmann is here attempting to edge God into the creation that he, in my view, correctly, shows to reject him in its evolution.
Why, in fact, does pantheism seem so plausible a philosophy to many evolutionary theorists, whether it be pantheism of matter, nature or life? The reason is not merely a striving for emancipation in rebellion against the church. †he reasons are factual, substantial ones. When eyes were turned towards the initial contingency of the world, theism always presented itself as the obvious philosophy, for theism distinguishes between God and the world. But when we are thinking about the evolution of the cosmos and of life from the contingency of events, dynamic pantheism seems much more plausible: the matter that organizes itself also transcends itself and produces its own evolution. So in this sense it is self-creative. This phenomenon can certainly be interpreted with the help of Spinoza's holistic theory. Natura est natura naturans. Consequently, deus sive natura. But the trinitarian doctrine of creation suggests a pneumatological interpretation. The God who is present in the world and in very part of it, is the creative Spirit. It is not merely the spirit of God that is present in the evolving world; it is rather God the Spirit, with his uncreated and creative energies. (p.212).
Moltmann is here attempting to edge God into the creation that he, in my view, correctly, shows to reject him in its evolution.
6 August 2010
No Date? Didn't Happen!
Watching a recent Martin Clunes show on TV, called, I think, the Islands of Britain, he met the self-styled head of the island of Forvik, an also self-styled 'Crown Dependency.
The fellow claims to have researched the legal status of the Shetland Islands and cannot find any dated link to the English or Scotish governments. He said on camera "If there's no date, then it didn't happen".
Which underlines the significance of dates in the Genesis account (whatever you, dear reader, think of them). Conversely to Forvik: if there is a date, it did happen!
Genesis makes the point that its events happened in history, and so they can be dated; and are.
The fellow claims to have researched the legal status of the Shetland Islands and cannot find any dated link to the English or Scotish governments. He said on camera "If there's no date, then it didn't happen".
Which underlines the significance of dates in the Genesis account (whatever you, dear reader, think of them). Conversely to Forvik: if there is a date, it did happen!
Genesis makes the point that its events happened in history, and so they can be dated; and are.
5 August 2010
Moltmann on Creation: more
A discernment of the eschatological redemption of the whole creation through Christ was the premise which led to the deduction that the protological creation had its foundations in Christ. This conclusion underlies the NT statements about Christ as ‘the mediator in creation’. We find the beginnings of this idea in Paul .He bases the liberty of believers in all sectors of life on the fact that everything is subjected to the sovereignty of Christ, but bases the universality of Christ’s sovereignty on the fact that everything has been created through him: ‘For us there is only one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist; (1Cor 8:6). In the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians too, awareness of the universality of salvation in and through Christ leads to the insight that ‘in him all things were created’ (Eph. 1:9ff.; Col. 1:15ff.). ‘The first-born from the dead’ (Col 1:18) is also ‘the first-born of all creation’ (1:15).
Hebrews 1:2 then presents the Christian vista of the universal lordship of Jesus, the Son of the eternal Father, and his mediatory function in creation, together with his preservation of the world and purification of our sins through him. ‘The Son’ is called ‘the brightness of his glory’ and ‘the express image of his (God’s) person (Heb 1:3 AV). These are symbols which Israel’s wisdom literature used to describe the eternal Wisdom of God through whom God created the world, still sustains it, and will one day glorify it (Prov. 8:22-31). The NT idea of Christ as mediator in creation is based on a sophia christology, according to which Jesus is both God’s Son and his eternal Wisdom. The Logos christology of the Gospel of John goes back to this when it declares: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All things were made through him, and without him was not anything bade that was made’ (John 1:1, 3)(pp 94, 95 God in Creation)
The experience of the eschatological reality of the Spirit leads to the conclusion that this is the same Spirit in whose power the Father, through the Son, has created the world, and preserves it against annihilating Nothingness: ‘When thou takest away their breath, the die and return to their dust. When thou sendest forth thy breath, the are created; and thou renewest the face of the ground’ (Ps. 104:29-30).(p. 96)
The earlier theological idea of the Creator Spirit who interpenetrates, quickens and animates the world was pushed out by the modern mechanistic world picture. (p. 98)
and I especially like this:
…pantheism has turned people into indifferentistsquoting Heine (p.103) which is, I think an explanation of the moral and ontological result of evolutionism!
First 55 minutes
Frances Schaeffer, in an interview toward the end of his life with Christopher Catherwood, stated the crucial evangelistic importance of a sound space/time doctrine of creation. The author heard him remark in a discussion group at L'Abri in December of 1968 that if he had an hour with a person on a plane who did not know the lord, he would spend the first fifty-five minutes talking about creation in the image of God and were that man came from, and the last five minutes on the presentation of the gospel of salvation Schaeffer felt we are greatly mistaken to avoid the important subject of how we go her , why we are like we are, who is in charge, by whose rules we should play;, and by whose rules we will be judged. Schaeffer thought that when one avoid those questions, which are deeply implanted in every human heart, and jumps immediately to salvation, one loses the major impact on those who are seeking the truth. (p17 Creation and Change by Douglas Kelly)
4 August 2010
Know your past
This letter appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald today:
Tim Dean (Letters, August 3) says we should stop concerning ourselves about the distant evolutionary past and decide what is best for us today. Humans, like all living things, have been evolving to suit their environment for billions of years. Ten or 12,000 years ago we started to change the way we lived and the environment we lived in. If we don't understand our ''distant past'', we have little hope of dealing with our present circumstances.
How true, but which 'distant past'? For the Christian, I would think that the Bible gives us the only useful information about our 'distant past' and the point is well made; without this information, we have little hope of dealing with our present circumstances.
Either our distant past shows us we are in the family of God, or it makes us part of the family of dust!
Tim Dean (Letters, August 3) says we should stop concerning ourselves about the distant evolutionary past and decide what is best for us today. Humans, like all living things, have been evolving to suit their environment for billions of years. Ten or 12,000 years ago we started to change the way we lived and the environment we lived in. If we don't understand our ''distant past'', we have little hope of dealing with our present circumstances.
How true, but which 'distant past'? For the Christian, I would think that the Bible gives us the only useful information about our 'distant past' and the point is well made; without this information, we have little hope of dealing with our present circumstances.
Either our distant past shows us we are in the family of God, or it makes us part of the family of dust!
2 August 2010
Moltmann on Creation
As long as nature and human history represent promises of future glory itself, all knowledge of God and the world is parabolic, figurative knowledge…Images make present what is absent. when what was absent is present, the image is no longer necessary; it is even detrimental…The parable and the thing compared will no longer be distinguished from one another, because God will be directly and universally manifest through himself, and creation with all created things will participate directly and without any mediation in his eternal life.(p. 64 God in Creation)
…the verb bara’ is used exclusively as a term for the divine brining forth, for which there is no corresponding human analogy. The world means a bringing forth in the sphere of history, nature and spirit, through which something comes into existence which was not there previously…This shows the divine creativity has no conditions or premises…It is neither actually nor potentially inherent or present in anything else.(p 73)
All the works which the Creator makes in his creation follow one another consecutively; the phrases ‘and God said…’, ‘and God separated…’ make this evident(p. 74)
Creation is not a demonstration of his boundless power; it is the communication of his love, which knows neither premises or preconditions: creation ex amore Dei… In his love God can choose; but he chooses only that which corresponds to his essential goodness, in order to communicate that goodness as his creation and in his creation….His love…leads him to go out of himself and to create something which is different from himself gut which none the less corresponds to him…the Sabbath – makes it unequivocally plain that creation was called into being out of the inner love which the eternal God himself is…The event of creation is depicted as creation through the Word…God ‘makes’ his creation through the Word which he utters. The word of creation is the continuum joining the Creator and his creation.(p.76)
Anyone who believe in the God who created being out of nothing, also believes in the God who gives life to the dead. This means that he hopes for the new creation of heaven and earth. (p. 93)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)