Enuma Elish

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

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

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

Dinosaurs in Eden?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two books

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

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

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

Genesis literary?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conflict on evolution

Al Mohler gets discussed in this Baptist article.

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

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

Tom's midnight garden

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

After discussing theories of time, Tom says:

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

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

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

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

Reading on Origins

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

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

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

A quick think suggests that design is characterised by:

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

When is a day...a day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clods

Read in the SMH reprinting a Telegraph article:

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

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

Joshua Davidson

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

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

Preaching on Genesis

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

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

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

Have a listen to:

Joseph Pipa on the Doctrine of Creation

Gary Hendrix also on the Doctrine of Creation

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

could have

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

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

There are two answers to the question, I think:

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

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

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

Stick up for Atheists!

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

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

A reply might have gone along these lines:

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

OR

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

OR

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

OR

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

How come?

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

OR

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

OR

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

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

Genesis and Poetry

My comments on an article on Genesis and Poetry:

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

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

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

Translating leadership

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

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

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

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

My suggestion: to develop service teams for each congregation.

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

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

Original: To further develop a culture of equipping leaders.

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

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

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

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

Refutations

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

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

What Good's Creation?

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

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

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

Quadrant on Christians

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

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

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

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

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

What your exegesis says about your exegesis

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

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

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

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

Sustainability

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

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

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

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

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

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