Two Books

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

Bacon's dictum is thus:

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Which God?

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

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

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

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

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

Feeling powerful?

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

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

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

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

Old Earth?

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

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

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

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

So their source is….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My further notes:

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

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

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


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

Demonstrated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its not right, its not even wrong!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can God Speak?

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

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

Destroyed by Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contra Keller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prophets on Creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isaiah 44:24

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

Note especially the 'all alone'

and

Isaiah 48:13

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


Jeremiah 10:16

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

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

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.

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:

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.

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.

Challies on evolution

Tim Challies, whom I've recently added to my blog roll, has this nice post on evolution and Christian thought.

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.

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?

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

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'.

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.

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!