Beyond the Pahl 5

Pahl:

Finally, if I’m right about these first four points, then whatever my personal perspectives are on exactly when or precisely how God created all things is a moot point. I'm not a scientist, so my thoughts on these matters carry no weight. And, with respect to my salvation, my orthodoxy, and my biblical fidelity, any thoughts I have on these matters are irrelevant.

Thoughts:

No if you are right about the first four points, then that God created at all, or if there is a personal God in relation with us is the moot point, if the details are rejected, then the world picture the details paint must also be rejected.

But, he's not a scientist, so his thoughts carry no weight? He's a theologian, and questions of origins are religious questions. He is eminently qualified to comment, because what we understand about origins is basic to how we grapple with the world and how we build our world picture. Our view of origins is our view of both ourselves and God (or what is independently basic). Resign this religious ground, and you leap towards deferring to an alternative conception of the world and not the one God provides.

Thus finally we come full circle to the ontology that Pahl must entertain: it must be a materialist ontology, where all that doesn't fit in a purely material conception is grafted on 'idealistically', or if I would be blunt: 'paganistically' where access to the real is not direct, but by conjuring because in the  materialist world we are either cut off from it, or 'it' is fictional, but hints of a deeper 'occult' reality to which our only access is illegitimate. Either way, not Christian.

Why don't they get it?

In the current Creation Ministries International Prayer News (Jan-Mar 13), the lead article bears the title used by this post and asks why do evolutionists refuse to be persuaded by the evidence (and arguments, presumably) put to them in support of the biblical flood and creation accounts.

Two answers are suggested in the article:

1. most evolutionists have not heard a [substantial] presentation of the case for creation, etc. and
2. they assume that all the evidence...supports evolution.

I think this misses the point.

Sure, if a disinterested person was given good reason to change their mind, one assumes that they would. But most evolutionists are not disinterested. They have a commitment, indeed, a religious commitment, to evolution's dogma.

Even should the evidence be overwhelming, many would retain their commitment because it is the basis for their world-concept and structures the foundational parameters of their life and understanding. To be persuaded they would have to, necessarily, change their intellectual, and spiritual allegiance from material which cuts them loose morally, epistemologically and ontologically to a person who seeks relationship and fellowship (with the converse if he, God, the creator, is rejected).

I think most evolutionists would understand this. Oddly, most Christians, being those who attempt the futile and non-credible amalgam of evolution and creation known as theistic evolution, don't see it. Odd, because one would think that Christians above all would understand that basic beliefs set the direction and preferences of the superstructure of understanding they support.

Lennox

A recent review of a book on the 7 days of creation (I thought it was 6, but there you go) by John Lennox addressed his disdain for the reliability of the information we have in Genesis.

Lennox is a very active debater, and a very engaging speaker as well. He is one of the current darlings of the Sydney Anglican TE crowd, likely because he endorses their uncritical acceptance of evolution as though it was a technical matter, equivalent to bicycle repair!

Lennox and those like him, however, as one of the comments on the review article pointed out, denies that God's self-disclosure about his creating has any content. I wonder what he thinks it's for then? Then in an absurd irony, he accepts that God created, but not any of the information that God gives us to show that he created!

So, how does Lennox know that God created, if the information in Genesis is incorrect?

Then, on the other hand, how does Lennox know (KNOW) that Genesis 1 is conterfactual? As another commenter pointed out, evolutionary rhetoric itself relies on a set of beliefs, not on anything to do with knowledge; a set of beliefs whose only job is to overturn the idea of creation and install a world picture that makes material primary.

Beyond the Pahl 4

Pahl:

Fourth, these modern questions about exactly when or precisely how all things came about, while potentially having tremendous theological significance, are best left to science. One should consult astronomers, physicists, geologists, paleontologists, biologists, and geneticists for these questions, not biblical scholars and theologians, let alone people who are neither trained theologians nor trained scientists.

Thoughts:

Interesting that something with potentially tremendous theological significance is best left to a pursuit which has no theological interest! But these are not simply modern questions. The church has held for about 1850 years that the world was formed about 6000 years ago. I suppose he must include Ussher in the 17th century as modern, and while in historical terms he is, I suspect that ‘modern’ in this passage means contemporaneously. So the question has been in the minds of theologians since theologians have been writing.

Nor is it that these are questions of potential theological significance; rather, they are questions pregnant with theological, and I might add, philosophical significance that go to the very foundation of Christian faith and the formation of the Christian world picture. The answers to the question will either respond in faith to Genesis 1, as the writer to the Hebrews exemplifies (11:4), and thus think within a theological structure that has God acting, relating and speaking with effect into this world circumscribed by common causality, physicality and where the Word of God delineates actual and not imaginary formations and relationship; or will reject the Hebrews writer’s faith response and defer to a world picture that refers to material as self-made, rejects that the personal is fundamental to reality and whose basic ontology is conjured up out of imaginings (thus the idealism that echoes throughout paganism, and marks its tracks) which connect only faintly with the real world of relationships and events.

Pahl's deference to science is completely misplaced and itself imports a prior concept of the world into biblical analysis. The concept is akin to the hollow and finally self-refuting nostrums of logical-positivism!


It is in pagan religions that questions of the material world are of secondary moment, because they are not engaged with the world that is, but an imaginary world of the mind; the world that is rejected with paganism’s rejection of the God who is. It is Christianity that stands in the world as present, and engages the world that is, that we all share as the setting of our existence, knowing and being. A great example of this is that the flowering of modern science is fixed firmly in the understanding that the Genesis account relates what happened; modern science started in no other thought world!

The question of origins is the question of who we are, what our connections or relationships are with other parts of the world, and sets the field of our thinking. It is the most profoundly important question that there is.

Thus the question doesn't 'potentially [have] tremendous theological significance' and is best left to science! The question of origins is a basic religious question, not a question for science at all. Pahl does his trade an injustice in slipping over this demarcation point and then fails to be able to make any real address to the world which conceptualises itself primarily in materialist terms, and uses these terms to bring all other considerations to heel.

Christianity doesn't adopt materiality as basic, of course, but has it as the result of God's willful love, and a real place where our lives are lived (including our life with God). But it and its processes being contingent, are not basic; in opposition to materialist conceptions.

And so, Pahl ends his excursion into resignation by suggesting we consult physical scientists about origins. Of course, in so doing we get modern, largely materialist speculation, and the 'meaning' that flows from this. We do not get any reflection of a world made by the will of God, but a world whose 'origin' denies that there is a God, or that his will (should there be one) has any bearing on life in this universe at all.

Mr Looking-both-ways

People who espouse 'theistic-evolution hold two incompatible ideas simultaneously:

1. the universe was created, but in such a way that it is fully explicable without a base in, or even a hint of, the personal-divine, and

2. God did this creating and uses his being the creator (referring to the terms of his activity in the Genesis account) to link his identity to our world-experience, making a god who represents himself by something that has no obvious connection with him!

This peculiar idea quickly falls back to an understanding of the world that is hard to distinguish, in the final analysis, from the idea of a world not created at all.

Beyond the Pahl 3

Pahl:

Third, the point of the biblical creation stories in Genesis 1-2 is not to answer modern questions about exactly when or precisely how all things came about. It is to answer, through an ancient genre for an ancient people, some common human questions, questions about who God is as Creator, what the cosmos is as God's creation, who we are as God's creation, how God as Creator relates to his creation, how we are to relate to our Creator and the rest of his creation, and the like. All subsequent biblical theology—as my first point illustrates—continues in this same trajectory.

Thoughts:

Interesting that he sees Genesis as having the same function as I see, but for completely different reasons!
He thinks it has this function despite having no relation to the real world that we live and move in; whereas I think that it can only have this function by virtue of being entirely about things that happened in and connected with the real world. Indeed with their connection to the real world made clear both in language and the references to shared 'real world' markers (my phrase 'common causality' captures this, but I use it to refer to the spatio-temporal continuity between the effect of God's word for, to and in this world, and its results).
It it that these things happened that they provide the platform for the other things. If they didn’t happen, and I repeat, something else instead did; then God is not shown as an actor in the world, but a figment unrelated to the world. If every point of relational connection is denied, which Pahl does, the whole theory of being that we use, or 'basic ontology' has to be derived from elsewhere. And this is the nub of the problem that I don't think is ever really dealt with in putting Genesis 1, etc. out of ‘this world’ and into some other, emblematic world where none of us really live.

Notable moment

In every phenomenon the beginning remains always the most notable moment.

Thomas Carlisle

Beyond the Pahl 2

Pahl:

Second, beliefs about exactly when and precisely how God created all things are neither central nor essential to an authentic Christian faith or a historically orthodox Christianity. Thus, it is not necessary for the sake of one's faith to hold to any beliefs about these matters with strong conviction; in fact, it may even be unwise to do so.

Thoughts:


Its interesting that people make this assertion just before they deny that Genesis 1, etc means anything in the real world. I always wonder about their information on this count and the rationale behind their claim. And it is always worth remembering that it is a mere claim. One made, I might add, that flies in the face of the biblical data, and is usually unsubstantiated (as per Pahl himself, of course).

But Pahl clouds the issue, just like Satan did in the garden, I might add, by inserting some concepts that aren't in the text, or in the Bible generally, then contradicting these concepts. An obvious 'straw man' manoeuvre.

Of course beliefs about EXACTLY when and PRECISELY how God created all things are neither central nor essential...etc. [And nor did God say ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden']

No one says that they are; but what the Bible is quite clear about is GENERALLY when God created, and, in BASIC terms the method he used.

Well, its a bit more than 'basic' terms when it comes to method, as the method is quite clear. He spoke things into existence; or brought them into being by divine fiat: by willing them so.

What is contended for is that generally the biblical time scale is orders of magnitude smaller than the naturalist time scale. ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE! We are not talking about a small thing here. It's also worth noting that the biblical time scale has always been orders of magnitude less than the naturalist or pagan time scale; humanity seems to have a built in desire to push the genetic connection between God and itself as far away as it can.

While reading Bulfinch's Mythology I came across this, in Palmer Bovie's foward: "If our readers ask when all this took place, we must answer, in the first place, that mythology is not careful of dates...". Thus the placing of the creation in time is very important to its historicity. If it happened in time, it needs to be set in that time; which of course, places the events of creation in our history, and removes them from an idealist or fantasy (pagan) construction that has no real relationship with 'us and now'. This is also an important part of the specificity of the recount of events in the creation passage.

It is also contended that how God created differs radically from the naturalist/materialist formulation. It's not just a little different, different as to precise values; it is vastly different. Pahl might have gained some credibility if he'd recognised these matters rather than attempted to subvert them in yet another language game.

With the 'precise' means of God's creation in question, Pahl seems to think that the Biblical data has no real bearing on anything, and we can make of it what we like. But not so. Materialist/naturalist formulations are a world apart from the Bible's formulation and therefore mean entirely different things. Thus it is important that the creation account conveys real information, because it is about something that really happened. It would be odd (and irrelevant) if it were otherwise.

The basic issues I canvassed briefly in a previous blog, but to go further (and I stoop to using 'bullets'):

• creation is the representation of God as he is: that he acted (in the terms used; there being no other reference in the biblical world-concept) is his credential for god-ness, how he acted is the representation of his nature
• creation underpins the conceptualisation of the world and the world thus represents God's action in creating, and does not obscure it, or if the world doesn't connect with God's statements about creation, then the representation is a vain one, and empties God of any claim on us.
• the naturalist 'method' is alien to God, it is impersonal and loveless; the creation account shows that is not so and, rather, has its source and unfolding in the personal and is embedded in love; it results from the action of one who cares, and cares above all for relationship; not one who sets up a machine, then lets it run.

The contrast could not be more stark; the natural method denies that mind is essential to the creation of complex order, of information, and that love is unnecessary for the creation of community and interdependence.

It overturns the counter-conceptualisation of the world as naturally explicable, and in relation to no mind or will that is over above it; rather all mind and will is contained within it: hardly god-like!

Another quote from Palmer Bovie's forward to Bulfinch: "...just as Darwin was reviving man's physical life history..." One thing the creation account does, and that the Bible hinges on, is that man's physical life history, is one with man's 'any other' life history. Action is bound up with both thought and meaning in the Biblical conception of the world. The creation account tells us that there is one unified world from the will of God; Pahl would separate our world into different and disconnected compartments; multiple worlds at work, with the world's physical history unlinked from the 'religious' history in a move that would do a pagan proud and destroys meaning.

Thus it IS important how and when things were created by God. This information establishes a number of important things about us, the world and who we are before God and in the world; about the world as setting for our relationship with God and for his redemption of us, and about the basic ontology of the world; which Pahl sets aside to make the way for an ontology that contemplates a different world, and entails a 'god' different from the one who reveals himself.

Pictures and words

Some commentators seem to regard Genesis 1 not as an account of creation, but as a picture of it. They either say this explicitly, or imply it. For instance, the 'framework' hypothesis is said by some to provide a sort of 'picture' of creation.

If the creation account is a picture, then something else is the real thing and tells us really about origins and the world. It is this that 'really happened' that defines us and the world we are in, and not the biblical account.

On this basis, the picture isn't worth even a single word; it doesn't tell us anything worthwhile! But the good news is, you don't have to buy this picture.

Perils of Theistic Evolution

I saw this nice comment on the Creation website's article Perils of Theistic Evolution:

Theistic evolution also puts a material-based principle between God and his creation. It makes some impersonal principle the mediator between God and man, and makes humanity the result, not of God speaking in love for fellowship, but of some abstract 'machine' making us; our 'father' cease[s] to be God, and he becomes the one who has pushed us away. Not only does this make the recourse to his being creator hollow, but it makes God's love for us pale, and causes the the basis for the gospel to leak away.

 There's a bit more to this, I think.

Not only to the TE-ers do this, but they do it with no reason from the Bible. They do it purely to accommodate the materialist program that the universe made it self, life is the result of matter, and mind is mere chemical reactions.

But they do it despite the Bible's lack of basis for their insertion because, I think, they think the Bible has no business talking about origins at all and if it does, they don't think that its important. Its not the Bible's proper domain.

Well, this is just neoplatonic waffle; creation is important in the Bible, because God represents himself to us as God on the basis of him being the creator; Christ's sacrifice and resurrection only makes sense if he is the creator: something the NT is pretty firm about; and God shows us that the personal (God's personhood) is basic to reality; it is the Christian 'first philosophy'. Above all, the creation account shows us the attachment point of this world to God: he made it and did so directly. There is no machine mediating between his love, expressed in his will, and our being.

Put another way, the starting point in making sense of life; of who we are and what is around us, of our relationships and understanding of the world, is our thinking about our origin. To say that the biblical information about origins is somehow incomplete, incorrect or irrelevant is to say that it does not provide the real basis for making sense of these things. And the 'sense' cannot be made both in a 'theological' biblical world that is factually inadequate, a mere 'picture' and in a completely different real world, where the sense we make has to, necessarily, play out. It is only the real world that counts. The line from origins then, to life now, has to be one line, and that line, to have any meaning at all, has to be a line in this world, and be staked at both ends in the same physical reality: that made by God, in love. If one sets aside the information that is in the Bible (Genesis 1, etc.); one is left in the imaginary reconstructions of evolutionary speculation, making a completely different sense of the world and ourselves.

Beyond the Pahl 1

In a post on his blog, Pahl set out his mini-manifesto of creation theology. It forms a suitable representative of the typical 'have it both ways' beliefs of most theistic evolutionists and so, I think, is worth commenting on. I'm setting out to do it over four or so parts.

Here, part 1:

Pahl

When it comes to origins, I have held to the same basic perspectives for quite a while now. I have stated, taught, preached, blogged, or published all of these points in various ways and in diverse venues for at least fifteen years.

First, God created all things—God himself and not merely some impersonal forces or natural laws. God created the heavens and the earth, and made humans in God’s image. Through Jesus Christ, the Word of God, the very image of God, all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible; without him nothing was made that has been made. Thus, there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.

Thoughts

One becomes instantly suspicious, I think, when a theologian has to declare his orthodoxy in this way; it seems to me that he must do so only because his position on these matters is not clear from his other writings. Indeed, I think we will see over this short series of discussions that most of Pahl's writing on the matter of origins would question every point of the statement he makes in such assertive tones. As if to say, "of course I believe what you believe, I just don't believe that it happened!" So he has to shore up his orthodoxy by denying that words have stable meanings and can be reliably tracked to 'this world' referents, across time and cultures. One thinks, in some matters, that a little too much is made of culture, and not enough made of words. Their range of intent seems to be mystifyingly rubbery and they thus can mean whatever one wants them to mean, except of course, what they actually say!

And thus, I wonder why Pahl believes as he states? He undoes the credibility of his belief at every turn, as later posts will show. To that extent he makes of belief the sort of nonsense that one might hear from a Mormon 'elder' so called, who urges belief because, well, he 'really-really' believes himself; nothing to do with the warranted belief that runs through the Bible.

 In Hebrews we are told that “By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible”. “By faith” does not mean, ‘unrealistic  hope against the facts’ but, because we weren’t there, we apprehend this information and accept its reliabiltiy and veracity by virtue of the word of God. The writer speaks to this in the preceding verse. The only information to which the writer could be pointing is the genesian account of creation; and this because it is the only information there is about our origin...anywhere. The locus of faith in the Bible is never counterfactual, but always predicated on actualities: in someone to be truthful to their word, or in things about which we are told, pinned to events that participated in this world's causality and whether events in a mind, or events in space.

Moreover, when the Bible refers to the creation, you can bet that the reference directs us to the Genesis account. The base creation account upon which all other references depending. So God is not the creator in some vague ethereal terms, or author of some general creation that cannot be pinned down, but of a 'creation' with specific biblical reference, and specific meaning in this world. The same terms that make sense in and circumscribe our existance in the space-time frame we inhabit and are constrained by are those terms that give the creation meaning and make a specific connection  to us by the common reference frame applying to both (deny this and the connection gets vague to the point of vanishing).

Later, confusingly, Pahl tells us that the only account we have of the creation doesn't represent things that happened. It just didn’t occur: something else occurred, presumably (which claim has its Monty Pythonesque aspect, I must suggest), but we are not told about it! How we know, I can't fathom (oh...science...we'll get to that in a later post).

So I have to wonder from whence he obtains his belief that God is creator if he denies the terms by which God represents himself as creator. He sets aside the only source of information which could underpin his belief as not in fact having happened in the terms of 'the real' that frames our lives and experiences; the information by virtue of which, in detail, we understand God as creator.

And it is the detail that is important here: the detail demonstrates God as creator by the actions he did with time and space effects. These tell us how the creation is constituted. Presumably, if this was not important, and not just 'important' in some vacuous rhetorical sense, but really important in the world we stub our toes in, it wouldn’t be provided. So if the detail is not about events, but about something else, firstly, how would we know, but then, how could we establish that God is creator? The only information he can give us, it is asserted or implied by Pahl, doesn’t actually relate to creation events, but, evidently, some other thing? What other thing this might be, we are not told. Perhaps, just a verbal flourish to 'out-flourish' the competitor accounts? But, if none of it happened, it is hard to see how it can even hope to sustain this rhetorical function.

And it's not just that 'something else' must have happened, but it's Pahl's language game that fascinates me. He takes it that words have meaning, and that meaning conveys content in the world that we are in. Presumably the content is related to some substance within the world, or the content, and the words that convey the content, would have no meaning that delineates anything within the common causality in which we live; they would be un-grounded in one sense, empty in every other. These words would merely ascend in a futile arc never landing in the world in which they were uttered to make meaning in that world in that world's terms.

Pahl's handling of the creation account in philosphical terms is even more dramatically deracinating of its biblical purpose. In saying that all the details in a house plan are wrong; but the right house will nonetheless somehow, but inexplicably, be communicated, he is speaking nonsense. This is far from a Christian approach to epistemology; knowledge is contained in the words that constitute language and have reference to the Real World that came from the fiat of God (nicely recursively), and not in pagan fashion, where content is maleable to preconception and any specific meaning is only to obscure an asserted and contrary 'truth'.

Thus, I would contend, contrary to the Cedarville College people, that Pahl is far from othodox in that he undoes the basic ontology of the Bible, founded in Genesis 1, and supposes that in the beginning, not 'God', but 'God and something...' Like most harmonisers, he fails to appreciate the grand scope of God's creation, and what it means to be solely and comprehensively from God. Like the ANE creation myths, he by implication presupposes a universe prior to God's creation of the universe! Not Christian at all.

John Chapman Foundation

I went to John Chapman's memorial service at St Andrew's Cathedral on 24 November. I admired John for his simple humility as a man, his easy communication of biblical teaching and his genuine interest in people. For an Anglican, he was as unstuffy and unimpressed by outward show as a Baptist. Excellent.

In the service papers there was a promotion for the John Chapman Foundation. Not a bad idea to remember the man and his ministry, and raise funds for the work of evangelism (probably just like Catholics have orders, Anglicans have foundations).

When I read the biog of John, I almost gagged. It was nothing like John himself, but full of the empty vanity of outward show and panting after worldly prestige and influence, as though these things are of any importance in the outlook of a Christian. They certainly never struck me as being of any significance in the John Chapman who I knew!

So, for the first time, I learn that he's preached in London; and presumably not London, Ontario, or London, Ohio. I wonder where in London he preached? In the middle of Baker Street? In Carter Lane? Clerks Place, near Wormwood St? All pretty pointless to say that he  preached in London. Anyone can preach in London. They do it all the time in Hyde Park!

But further, I see that he preached at Oxford University and Cambridge University. All I can say is, 'so what'. Does this make him a better preacher. Should I be impressed that he's been to some old stone buildings, where, incidently, anyone can preach, or am I supposed to infer that the VC called him up and said "John, what say you come along and preach to the Council here at Oxford." I think not. Rather these references represent mere Anglican bluster and hankering after worldy adulation, which, incidently, has zip to do with preaching the gospel, and double zip to do with anything in Australia, let alone Sydney. I note that there is no mention of mission work that John did (if he did) in Sydney University; right next to Moore College, or in Newtown, a densely populated suburb, also right next to Moore College, or work with the riff raff that inhabits the Sydney University Colleges (I think of St John's particularly), or about what he did do; and that was tirelessly work as a minister of the gospel in whatever setting he had access to, with humble and prayerful perserverance. And, that is the Christian way, not puffery about prestigious locations or institutions.

Or, maybe I'm wrong, maybe  John preached at Miami University, Oxford, in the USA...

Pahl...not orthodox?

An e-pal sent me his note to Michael Pahl, of recent post on this blog:

I've heard that you and Cedarville have parted company.

Unlike Cedarville, I *would* question your othodoxy.

Your view on Genesis 1, etc. amounts to a claim that nothing in Genesis 1 actually happened, and that our ontology, as Christians, therefore cannot be framed from the Bible (ontology being about what is, and ipso facto, what really is), but has to be grafted onto Christian faith from a pagan perspective in some sort of idealist conceit. So it seems that you want to pretend that questions of origins are 'scientific' questions, when their ontological implications are such that they are always finally theological questions, mediated in some ways philosophically.

Thus, you've resigned the field, and instead of allowing the revelation of God about his creation to set the structure of our understanding of our world, our setting in it, and the relations that reticulate through it, with reference to God himself (and this can only happen if G1 recounts things that happened, not fantasies, "fameworks" emblems, signs, or 'suggestions'), we are left to start our thinking with an ontological framework premised on there being no God, or if there is one, one who doesn't communicate and doesn't matter.

This is not in any way orthodox, but a view that makes Christian faith take its philosophical underpinning from a pagan world view, and is ultimately derivative of a materialist orthodoxy and not a challenge to it.

2 churches

I couldn't help but compare two local churches that have recently letter boxed my street.

One, an Anglican church, is about to celebrate the 100th anniversary of...wait for it...their building! No, not a church meeting on that site, or a church meeting in the area, or the local proclamation of the gospel, or a century of mission, no, none of those...but a darn building. As part of their celebration, they will be raising money, seeking to raise a lot of money, well in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And for? Missions? Aid? Helping people?

No, not on your nelly. They want to do more building work!

Then the other, not an Anglican church. It will be having its annual spring market. "Proceeds going to help refugees settling in Sydney".

I know which church I'd prefer to be part of.

Leave it to science

One of my listed blogs lead me to 'rustlings in the grass' where the basic perspectives on origins is to, finally, 'leave it to science' to connect us with our origins, and, presumably, to some sort of faith in some other-world set of events that God must be talking about in Genesis 1.

If I get around to it, I'll go into this a little more, but you can see my drift.

Just theological

Another zinger of a sermon this morning, further knocking Grudem out of play, for which I'm all cheers.

The minister unfortunatley has a view of Genesis 1, etc. (hereafter G1) that is common these days: that it is 'theological' and not anything else; and not therefore factual where it comes into conflict with contemporary cosmogony, evolutionary speculation or rampant materialism. One wonders how then one is able to figure which bits are important and which bits are mere 'dressing'?

But this is not a new position. I read of it in a work by Robert S. Candlish, D.D. (1806-1873) of Scotland who succeeded Thomas Chalmers in the chair of divinity at the New College, Edinburgh in 1841.

Quoting a work on Genesis:

To clear the way, therefore, at the outset, to get rid of many perplexities, and leave the narrative unencumbered for pious and practical uses, let its limited design be fairly understood, and let certain explanations be frankly made. In the first place, the object of this inspired cosmogony, or account of the world's origin, is not scientific but religious.

So...if its only religious, on what is the religious information carried, if it is not a factual account of events...is it carried on a mere fiction? If so, then the religions information is hardly worth our attention!

Yet, by the very notion of creation as set out in G1, it only has theological significance because it is about things that have happened. Just like the resurrection only has theological content because it had historical and physcial coordinates in history, and is in the same world of general causality as the one we live in. And so the resurrection has content for us. If it were in a different 'world' it would have nothing for us. And so 'creation' which sets the scene for all that follows.

Of men and women

This morning the sermon at church started a series looking at 'gender' as it is treated in the Bible.
We started with a reading from Genesis 1, which covered this passage:

Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” ²⁷ God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. ²⁸ God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply,

(NASB)

Of course, the NASB makes the same mistake as the NIV, which our church uses, and renders 'adam' as 'man'; when it should be 'mankind' at least, or preferably 'humanity' in today's usage.

The sermon series will deal with the arguments for 'male headship' put in Grudem's edited book on this topic. We dealt with the first today, and found nothing in G1 that can be construed as giving one sex primacy over another, contrary to Grudem's assertion. The notion of priority evaporates in the Bible's definition of 'man' as being created 'male and female' That is, together in the image of God, not one sex or the other so. This is further explicated in that [together] they are to be fruitful and multiply. A bloke can't do that by himself!

The sermon mentioned in passing the ANE context of Genesis 1, and I detected here, I think a verring to the idea that Genesis is a cultural work, rather than an inspired one, giving us concrete information about us and God. The minister made the point that the passage treated humanity in its relation to God completely differently from the ANE mythology. For example, humanity is not there to get food for the gods, but is fed by God. But this is not mere rhetorical point scoring by the Genesian author; it is that related thusly because that concretely corresponds to the real that the account reflects. If it is not doing this, then, of course it is without meaning and ranks only with other stories, bearing no relation to what really is and thus how our relationship to God is founded.

It ended rebutting the silly modern idea that men and women are different but equal, or are equal but have different roles. In the final analysis both versions of the rule-making error end up with a fake distinction between inequality and 'functional difference'. Its a thin language game that convinces no one outside the camp of the bluffers.

More on this, see Christians for Biblical Equality.

Let's be Buddhists

I can't see any real difference in their appraoch to 'religion' and the world between that of Theistic Evolutionists and, say, Buddhists; or Hindus, or animists, or Aboriginal dream-time story tellers.

All of them separate religion from the real world and make claims that lie outside the world we are in!

Yet the world-concept of Christianity is that the real world shares the contours of existence with the God whose speech is his actions, and his actions occur in the world of common causality that we inhabit; and its a 'real' world, not a lesser world that we can disregard, with the really real world elsewhere.

Theistic-evolution, along with Buddhism, discounts the real ness of the world we are in and has it that 'holy books' as a class (the Bible, for TEs) are about somethiing other than the real world, which therefore, must be other than the real setting for the ontological play between what is basically real, and our life-experience.

Bollocks, of course, because Christ emptied himself of God-claims to be one of us, for our sake!

The Perils of Theistic Evolution

Any critique of Theistic Evolution has to start behind the direct facts that might be contested (that is, 'science' and the Bible), and with the philosophical position that underpins the theology which allows the Bible to be relegated to a set of ancient stories and legends that may convey spiritual truth, but have no necessary relationship to the space-time world of common causality, even in the view of some evangelicals.

The theology is more about a Barthian approach to the Bible than the world-concept of the Bible, where words connect only to ‘faith’ ethereally and do not do so by way of depicting or explicating anything in the real-world of "A does not = non-A". The ‘real’ in this formulation, is not of this world, but in a philosophically idealist move is elsewhere, so the Bible, to communicate its ‘truth’ in this higher manner does not need to tell us anything about what has really happened; and in fact, in this view both need not, and probably cannot!

The counter to this is that the very account of creation shows that God and we participate in the same real world where words relate to events and actions that are denominated in the common causality upon which we depend, and, created by God, mediates our concourse with God as well as each other.

It is actual events and actions that are real, and that instruct our apprehension of the ontological coordinates that bring us to encounter God in action by which he demonstrates who he is and who we are in relationship to him. The idealist would have it otherwise, of course, but to attempt to impress them with science, while it may influence some, will probably have little effect, as they consider that we have missed their point that the Bible is a 'faith' book, not a 'fact' book; of course, it is only a faith book because it is a fact book, otherwise faith would be in irreversible dis-connect from the world in which we act and is the scene for our encounter with God, our salvation and for God's covenants.

To encapsulate this with an illustration, you may know the old Goon Show where a bank holdup involves the use of a picture of a gun. The theological idealist would have it that the Bible is a ‘picture of a gun’; but of course, this can have no real-world effect; what we need to hold up a bank (and to make a creation by fiat that delimits the world we are in) is a real gun (and a real creation in events that make sense in the world in which they are set, and which they define).

In short, the Bible is only theologically meaningful if it is meaningful in the real world terms by which it denominates itself. God is thus creator, not by weaving a symbolic story, that point to something or other, but because he created. He identifies himself with the sequence of fiat acts, not becuase they are symbolically meaningful, but because they occured. They are meaningful, then, because they occured, and not because they did not.

An example of how this plays out was in a post and exchanges on Michael Jensen's blog, the bloggin parson. (Jensen is a lecturer at Moore College, and son of the current archbishop of Sydney, Peter J.)

Jensen was asked if he thought that Noah, of flood fame, was a real person, and by implication, that the account related events that occured. Jensen avoided a direct answer, instead asking what the text was telling us.

Now, if the text is not telling us that there was a global flood and only Noah, his family, and the animals listed were saved, then it is not telling us anything and is just a story, 'made up', with no real world referents! The point of the account is that the events recounted really happened and had a real effect on the world: thus is scripture linked to the world we are in.

The alternative, that the text is 'telling' us something based on non-events, or events mis-recounted, then it has no content relevant for our consideration as it is not about anything real, and anyone can 'make up' a story. That's the easy part.

If true, then unimportant!

A very apt comment on this article about Richard Dawkins:

The great irony of views such as Dawkins' is that, if they are correct, they are at once unimportant! How so? No arrangement of atoms has a value privilege over any other arrangement; value refers to something external to the arrangement, which the materialism that Dawkins espouses denies exists.