tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14816339304581103952023-11-15T07:02:04.645-08:00Reflections in ExileBaddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-29193875369732938162010-04-19T01:25:00.001-07:002010-04-19T05:46:20.193-07:00Analogical Language about GodThis is a long response to a comment from a discussion based on <a href="http://solapanel.org/article/interchange_when_god_uses_a_word_it_means_what_it_says/">these</a> posts.<br /><br />Hello Nathan,<br /><br />I have really enjoyed your comments to me in this thread. I think they have the potential to push the conversation up another whole notch, so thank you. I'm not sure how many comments it is going to take me to deal with everything you've raised, but I think we need to settle back for a very long trip.<br /><br />Before we settle in, as someone who has regularly had people take offence at how I've said things on threads, I find using the scare quotes ' ' useful when I want to distance myself from something I'm saying in a thread. We're so used to journalists stating the side they like without the quotes and the side they don't like with the quotes that just using the quotes can often remove possible offence. e.g. 'Martin's "creaturely" view of God' or 'Mark's "mystery" view of God' I think takes most of the sting out of a one word summary. It seems to have cut down on the number of people I've unnecessarily offended, so something like that might work.<br /><br /><blockquote>I’m afraid that I’m going to have to (very respectfully) disagree with both your position and Martin’s. Let me see if I can outline more clearly what I believe is a third (and more reformed) way through this semantic entanglement :) </blockquote>Hee! I <em>love</em> third ways, and especially when they're more reformed than me. :) So the student has exceeded the teacher! Well then my young padawan, the force is clearly strong with you, lead the way. (And another thanks is in order: I always wanted to say that.)<br /><br /><blockquote>I don’t think, however, that you have avoided apophatic theology in your formulation. You’re position is essentially (at this point) no different from the <em>analogia entis</em> of the scholastics.</blockquote>You had to go and introduce <em>analogia entis</em> into this whole debate didn'tcha? This is going to take some words to address, because there's a huge amount at stake here.<div><br /></div><div>Okay, for those reading along who live in the real world, <em>analogia entis</em> means something like 'analogy of being' and the idea at stake is usually explained as there being some kind of correlation between creation and Creator - the creation is something like the One who called it from nothing, and hence language means something similar. Human power is a little like God's power, human goodness is a little like God's goodness etc. So language for God is analogical because it draws upon this analogy in reality, in existence, between us and God - we are a little bit like God.</div><div><br /></div><div>Behind such an idea is the notion of causality - cause and effect. God is the cause of creation, creation is the effect, and an effect will share some of the characteristics of its cause. Or to put it in a different approach again, works express nature. Human beings are only capable of doing human works, but those works truly express human nature - they are have human fingerprints on them. God's works express his nature. So creation is good because it is a work of the good God - God's attributes are displayed in a creaturely way in creation.</div><div><br /></div><div>Karl Barth famously identified Aquinas as being based upon an analogy of being and levelled pretty well every theological cannon he could find at the concept. For Barth, such an analogy would mean that there was some other basis for knowing God than the Lord Jesus Christ. It would mean that creation itself points to God (natural theology), and that that link forged by the act of creation is what enables any knowledge of God to take place. All of that was incompatible with Barth's desire to establish that God is free in his relationship with us - that God is Lord.</div><div><br /></div><div>In it's place, as far as I can see, Barth <em>still insisted that language for God had to be analogical</em> (please take note! - an analogy of language <em>without</em> the <em>analogia entis</em>) but suggested an analogy of faith, or analogy of grace as the bridge that made language work. There is no 'landing place' for God's Word in the human person, God effectively ignores creation and doesn't work with it. There is actually <em>no way at all that language can be used to speak of God</em> - the gulf between us and God is absolute and infinite. God creates the path specially in redemption. The Word of God creates the landing place in the person, it creates its own path between us and God.</div><div><br /></div><div>Such an approach really helped his 'core task' - freeing the Word of God from its Babylonian Captivity to Liberal scholarship. There is no basis in reality for us to know God. We have no resources <em>at all</em> to speak of God or know him. And so we can't create revelation, we can't initiate it, and we can't stand over it and judge it. Revelation is accountable to no-one and nothing other than itself - it is its own ground for justifying itself. It is free, it is Lord. You can't disprove God's Word by science, history or the like, and you don't need to get into all that stuff to apologetically defend it. You just proclaim the Word and it does all the work itself.</div><div><br /></div><div>With this in mind, you can see why so many people in Sydney feel drawn to Barth when they read him. Emphasising that God is in control in his revelation to us, that apologetics is a kind of unbelief and entirely useless for creating faith, that the Word of God preached creates faith and justifies itself and so we can ignore challenges from science, philosophy, history, social science etc, and that there is no other, more basic, ground to know God than Christ all gels with a lot of the concerns of 'Sydney Anglicanism'.</div><div><br /></div><div>My problem is that people don't seem to prepared to face up to the cost of Barth's approach. You get a lot, but in life you get what you pay for, and Barth's price-tag is pretty steep. A few examples:</div><div><br /></div><div>The biblical gospel is history. It is a statement about what happened in space and time in this world we live in. This means it <em>doesn't</em> simply justify itself, at least some of its ground comes from outside itself. If Christ's bones were discovered the gospel is gone. You <em>need</em> an empty tomb for the gospel to be true. Paul doesn't say in 1 Cor 15, "The resurrection of Christ is true because the Word of God says so." He doesn't even say, "It's true because an apostle says so, so pull your heads in." He says (implicitly), this happened in the world we live in and you, my original audience, can confirm it by talking to a whole bunch of witnesses. Barth's system implicitly sets up a 'two truth' approach - something is true in the 'real world' and yet when God speaks, for the purposes of hearing and obeying the Word of God (and only for those purposes) something else is true. Even if the bones of Christ were discovered the preacher would say, "Christ is risen" and the congregation would respond, "He is risen indeed" - because the Word of God entirely justifies itself and never has to give account to anything outside itself. It creates its own landing place and the contingent facts of history are irrelevant.</div><div><br /></div><div>Barth's argument that if creation formed a bridge then there'd be some other basis for knowing God other than the Lord Jesus Christ only works when you recognise that Barth rejected the idea that we could speak of the eternal Son of God before the Incarnation. For Barth, <em>as far as we are concerned</em>, the Son has always been human. The Lord Jesus Christ is the revelation of God, and in that revelation he is both God and Man, so we have no authority to speak of him other than as Incarnate. But for orthodoxy God created the world in and by and for his Son and Word. Creation and the Son are linked because the Father worked through the Son to make the world. So <em>analogia entis</em> isn't establishing a basis other than Christ for our knowledge of God. Rather, it simply shifts the issue from Christ's work as Redeemer, to his work as Creator as the ultimate ground. Redemption is redemption of a world that already exists, it is not the creation of a new one <em>ex nihilo</em> (from nothing). Christ's work as Redeemer doesn't stand on its own, somehow creating its own ground to stand on. It builds on and works within the boundaries established by Christ's work as Redeemer. Barth's position tends to push people to see an interest in creation as somehow anti-gospel - it pits creation and redemption off against each other. It separates the world from the One by whom and in whom and for whom it was made and in whom it holds together. And that's chickenfeed compared to making Chalcedon, with its talk of both natures not being changed by their union in Christ, almost unintelligible because you're not allowed to talk of an eternal Son before the Incarnation.</div><div><br /></div><div>Barth says that language still predicates something of God analogically in revelation. However, <em>there is no basis in reality for that analogy</em>. Creation is 'good' and God is 'good' but between God's goodness and creation's goodness is an <em>absolute and infinite</em> gulf. So what connection is there between our goodness and God's? Absolutely none. If it were otherwise then there'd be some ground in reality for the Word of God, it wouldn't have to create its own 'landing place' and the freedom of God in revelation would (supposedly) be curtailed. We could then say something about God's goodness from what we can see about the goodness of creation - natural theology. And that has to be avoided at all costs. So how does the analogy in language work? It just does. It says it does and therefore it does. As soon as the Word of God says that God is 'good' the link is established just by the Word of God saying so. It hasn't changed anything in reality - the gulf is still absolute and infinite, and so there's no comparison in reality between us and God, but somehow the comparison works in revelation and words can predicate things of God when they really can't. When it comes to Barth's theology people sometimes talk about 'building castles in the air'. I think it's more like some amazing, stunning, megapolis in the air. It's so impressive it takes the breath away. But as you keep digging into the foundations you realise that there's nothing there, it's built on nothing. Ontology (reality) has been collapsed into epistemology (knowing), it no longer forms the ground for knowledge to occur. And that's when you begin to feel like chicken little, running around crying 'The sky is falling, the sky is falling!'</div><div><br /></div><div>But it's even worse than that. The analogy of language doesn't <em>really</em> work. Making truth statements about God like, "God is good" is not <em>really</em> revelation. Revelation and God are identical. God <em>is</em> his revelation in the strongest possible sense. That's why the Trinity can be derived from revelation - God reveals himself through himself: God, God, and God again. The God doing the revealing is true God, the one in whom revelation occurs is true God, and what is revealed is true God <em>in the same sense as the other two instances</em>. That's why the Lord Jesus Christ is, <em>properly</em> speaking, the revelation and Word of God, and the Bible is only *ahem* analogically the Word of God. God is not a collection of truth statements, he's not a collection of 66 books, nor is he absolutely identical to any message those 66 books teach. God is a person, so only a person can reveal God in such a way that you end up with God and not merely statements about God. So the Bible gets us in contact with Christ, but Christ is actually the revelation of God, not anything the Bible might say about God (hence why Barth could acknowledge that the Bible teaches the existence of a personal satan but say that Christians aren't obligated to believe in such a thing). Barth's whole enterprise actually makes positive theology penultimate to a new kind of negative theology. We use the positive statements the Bible makes to get us in touch with Christ and at that point we have Divine Reality itself, unmediated by language (and hence reason) at all. An immediate, person to person communion. The writer of <em>the Cloud of Unknowing</em> would be jealous.</div><div><br /></div><div>The irony here is that people want to say, "No <em>analogia enis</em> there is <em>no similarity at all between creation and God</em>" and yet use language for God univocally. The same people who most are drawn to Barth (or sound like him, even if they're not aware whose footsteps they shadow) usually are the ones who just instinctively read the Bible as though it says things about God univocally. And yet, of the options, that's the one thing you absolutely can't do if Barth is right. Ultimately, language can only be analogical if God creates a path for it in the act of revelation itself. And even that has to be penultimate, for the purpose of taking us beyond itself to an encounter with God in Christ that goes beyond any truth statement made by the biblical writers.</div><div><br /></div><div>The final problem I'll raise here, is that this approach makes discipleship almost impossible. I'm going to stick my neck right out on this one, but I think it's the kind of thing that should happen on <em>Sola Panel</em>. For Barth, Revelation gives us the knowledge of God. Revelation is God. But revelation is all about God revealing himself. But for me to act I need God to stop talking about himself for a bit and start talking about me and the world. I need to know who I am, and what I'm supposed to do. But on Barth's system, all the Bible is doing is taking me to Christ who reveals God. That's it. Now, I need all of that. But I need more if I am to act - I need to know myself as well. And that's the big damage I think Barth has caused in Sydney. We don't have as good a grasp on the idea that theology gives us a knowledge of ourselves - we talk as though the Bible speaks 'only' about Christ. He's not just the centre, the centre has become the whole. (Now, I know that Barth does also say that Jesus Christ is the revelation of humanity as well. Jesus Christ isn't the true man - the ideal or perfect man who exemplifies what human beings <em>should</em> be. He is the real man - the man who reveals what it means to be human, the man who makes us all human. We are human because of the incarnation of Christ - the appearance of Jesus Christ in history retrospectively makes being human possible. It should be clear that, for me this is still more castles in the sky, and I can't say how relieved I am that this bit of Barth's theology has never had a lot of purchase in our circles.)</div><div><br /></div><div>This is one of the reasons why I think peole are so worried about 'moralism' in our circles - and why 'typical' Sydney preaching that I have heard often lacks much of a cutting ethical edge compared to all the other resources we bring to our preaching. We preach as though God's demands on our lives - the moral imperatives in the Bible - are only there to lead us to Christ, they are just another way in which Christ is proclaimed to us. They aren't meant to bring us into the spotlight of God's Word, that shines on Christ and on Christ alone. We really struggle with 'the third use of the Law' - the idea that preaching and meditating on the Bible's commands and instructions can actually spur Christians on in the Christian life. For us, imperatives can't do that, only promises can. You don't help believers become more godly by exhorting, commanding, or correcting. You can only do it by pointing to the finished work of Christ on the cross.</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm gong to stick my neck right out now. The irony here is that Sydney's two arguably most influential sons, the Jensen brothers senior, Peter and Philip, seem to me to be out of step with 'the Sydney Anglican' culture as a whole at this point. Their preaching is <em>characterised</em> by its ethical cutting edge. They have tried to encourage people to preach the 10 commandments. They invest serious time into understanding the world in which they live - cultural analysis - and see that what the Bible says correlates to the actual world they live in. They're <em>good</em> at listening to the enscripturated Word of God, looking at what life is like in modern Sydney and then pointing and saying "That, that there. That's what the Bible is talking about here. <em>That's</em> what sin (or godliness) looks like in our context." It's christocentric, but it's not christomonistic. It's theological but profoundly concerned with ethics, with godliness. It invests a lot into cultural analysis but that isn't the engine of what's being said, it's no pre-critical framework that Word of God has to fit into. They're hardly clones, but at this point they seem to be in agreement, an agreement whose example helped me debug Barth and the issues he raises. Now there are a <em>lot</em> of people in Sydney who know these two much better than I. So if I've managed to read either of them wrong and they're actually big fans of Barth and his whole enterprise, or even agree with Barth with demolishing the <em>anologia entis</em> then hopefully someone will join the thread and correct the record.</div><div><br /></div><div>With all that in mind, here's where I stand on <em>angalogia entis.</em></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; ">I am very sceptical about Barth's rejection of natural theology, analogy of being, et al. It's not so bad that I think, "Barth disagreed with <em>analogia entis</em> so therefore I should agree with it." That's just daft. But I do tread very, very carefully - I need some decent reasons to reject something that seems to me to have been assumed by mainstream theology in the early church, the middle ages, and in the Reformation. Barth's rejection of the <em>analogia entis</em> and his assertion of an 'absolute and infinite chasm' between God and creation seems to me to be little more than saying "Oh, and by the way chaps, Kant was right - you can't get there from here. There's no basis in reality for human language to predicate things of God." He's allowed to do that. But that's not really theology speaking at that point, that's German philosophy pretending to be theology. It might be right, but, to me, it seems to be a denial of the very thing Barth claims to be fighting for - pure theology that creates all its own ground. Moreover, in general evangelicals aren't overly happy with Kant. We don't think he's been a great friend to faith. So I'm not sure why we all seem to feel the need to adopt this orphan child of his offered to us in Barth's swaddling clothes. </span></em></div><div><br /></div><div><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; ">Having said that, I'm not particularly committed to an analogy of being either. I just haven't done the work to chase it through, and it's such a senstive issue in our context that I'll hold off until I grasp things well enough to address it. Even if Barth's wrong as to why it's wrong (and I'm pretty sure about that) he might be right that it's wrong nonetheless. </span></em></div><div><br /></div><div><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; ">But, at this point in time, it seems to make a lot of sense to me. Creation is good because it is the work of the God who is good. It seems strange to me to go stomping in at that point and say, "Unbelief! Unbelief! There's no relationship at all between the goodness of creation and the goodness of her Creator!" If Christ is the One in and through whom all things came to exist and be what they are, then I'm not bypassing him by saying that language can speak of God because of the Creator-created relationship. Understood rightly, it seems at least as strongly Christocentric as Barth's approach.</span></em></div><div><br /></div><div><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; ">But I'll say that I don't think I have to sign up to any theory as to why language about God works analogically to say that it does. At this stage, I'm fairly confident that language about God has to work analogically. In time I might see what is the reason for that. And that might be the <em>analogia entis</em>. But it might be something else. I've been strongly influenced by reading Athanasius and he has some significant things to say about how objects precede words and how the words have to be understood in light of the object they name, not <em>vice versa<em>.</em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"> It seems to me that the Arians tried the same kind of 'semantic domain has to carry through' argument on him that, in different ways, you and Martin have run on me. And Athanasius just blew raspberries at them. He argued for a theology from above, not from below, where the reality of God in Christ shapes the words and gives them a meaning proper to that object alone. The divine reality determines the meaning of words used on him, they don't govern w</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">hat he can be by their pre-existing usage. That seems to me, at this point in time to have the potential to create the kind of theoretical framework necessary for analogical language to work without necessarily adopting an analogia entis.</span></em></span></em></div><div><br /></div><div><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><em><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">So analogia entis? Pfft. The bogeyman is scarier.</span></em></span></em><blockquote><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The problem with saying, as you have done at least twice now,<br /></span><cite><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">The words mean something similar when used of God but not the same.</span></cite><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><br />is that immediately we are forced to qualify in what way the words are similar, and in what way they are different. If you try to do this, you quickly discover that it is an impossible task to positively qualify their differences. You are left with only negative statements about God.</span></blockquote>I don't think I am forced to do that all. I don't work out what 'father' means by creating a list of all the ways that it differs from every other word. I don't break every concept down into its bits, determine every bit in the puzzle and then construct a meaning of the word by putting those bits together in the right order. That's the usual empirical foundationalism nonesense (hello Hume) that I reject completely. I just 'get' what fatherhood is. I mightn't even be able to explain what it is well to someone else. I mightn't know where all the boundaries of the concept are and answer every possible question about it. But I still 'get' what it means to say - "This man is my father." And when I say, "God is my Father", I don't think that I either go, "Here's the core semantic meaning of fatherhood, and that carries through to God" (univocal approach) or I go "Here's all the ways that God's fatherhood is different from all other fatherhoods" (your view of how analogical has to work). I just get that God is my Father. And that it's different but the same as my human father. Discovering those differences and similarities is something that I grow into over time as I reflect, but I start by just getting the reality directly through the word 'father' and getting that it's speaking of something quite different than earlier occurences of the word.<br />I think words have the power to put me in touch with the reality or concept they name more or less directly. I get a sense of the thing more or less at the start, and over time begin to grasp its shape and boundaries as I get more familiar with it. Objects, especially God, reveal themselves to me through language. They don't sit there passively as I construct a concept to reach out to them. I think my understanding of language is so different from yours at this point that I can't find a way to respond to your critique other than to say, "Nup, it's not like that at all."<br /><br /></div><div><blockquote>Perhaps an example might help. God is good. But not good like a good book - he isn’t enjoyable to read. And not good like a human - he doesn’t conform to the moral order for which he was created in relationship to his creator. In what way is God then good? He is in fact not good in any way in which we might apply the word to anything else. So God’s goodness fits into a semantic category all on its own, and is therefore beyond our ability to define. As far as I can see, this is where the <em>analogia entis</em> leaves us. He is good perhaps in some way similarly to us, but we can’t say positively how.</blockquote>I respectfully disagree with your position here. :) God's moral order in creation is an expression and subset of his own goodness, justice, love, et al. God's not restrained or contained by his Law, sure. But that doesn't mean that the goodness of the Law of God is not grounded in the goodness of God. God doesn't murder. God doesn't lie. God is love. God does not acquit the guilty or condemn the innocent. Now, God's goodness transcends his Law, and so somehow the election of his people to eternal life and his passing over the unrighteous is good and just; the existence of sin in the world is good and right; the suffering we undergo that God could stop at any moment is good and right - all at some level above what the Law defines for human life.<br /><br />But none of that is apophatic. The Law is a genuine expression of the goodness of God - they aren't arbitrary rules God's just whistled up for us. They are an expression into this creation of God's goodness to shape our human life. So God's goodness simply has to be more than the Law because God's 'life' is not a human life. But God is not less good than the Law or differently good than the Law, it's just that he's God and that's a very different 'job description' than we have. He's good in ways that apply particularly to being God - ways that we just can't grasp. But if that's apophatic (negative theology) then that means that God can't be good until the Law applies the exact same way to him that it does to us. And that really is disastrous - the price tag there for univocal language is just way too steep.<br /><br /><blockquote>However, what prevents Calvin from descending into apophaticism at this point isn’t the analogia entis, Calvin won’t resort to this at all, in fact. What saves him at this point is his strong distinction between person and nature. When Calvin discusses the goodness of God (Inst. I.x.2) he claims that God is good in precisely the same way that we are good, because his goodness is seen in his personal relationship to us. The language can be univocal at this point because God is truly in his persons how he is towards us. Ultimately it’s the incarnation that allows us to speak positively of God, because it is the incarnation that proves that human language (and indeed humanity in general) is a fit vehicle for the description of God - as he relates in his persons.</blockquote>Okay, I've read, and reread I.x.2 and if I've got the section and chapter right I can't see anything that resembles what you are saying here. Can you give me the quotes from there that lead you to say:<br /><li>God is good in precisely the same way that we are good</li><li>That this is because God is truly in his persons how he is towards us.</li><li>That the incarnation proves that human language is a fit vehicle for the description of God.</li><br />What you're claiming here runs strongly counter to my impression of Calvin's theology. My view lines up more with what Paul Helm says in <em>John Calvin's Ideas</em>, Oxford University Press, New York, 2004 p31<br /><br /><blockquote>At the same time, Aquinas and Calvin are to be distinguished from a number of modern philosophical theologians because their use of the distinction between God in himself and God as he is towards us signals the existence of a substantive ‘epistemic gap’ between God and ourselves. Those who acknowledge this distinction understand that it involves the recognition of cognitive limitations on our part…[all of this] is not acknowledge in some modern philosophical theology.<br /><br />There are perhaps two interconnected reasons for this. One is that modern philosophical discussion of the concept of God takes for granted that the language necessary to elucidate the concept of God is typically univocal. Modern philosophical theologians resist accounts of language about God that involve a theory of analogy or accommodation, for example. They prefer accounts that are univocal even while they stress human cognitive limitations.<br /><br />In both Aquinas and Calvin some of the human language about God is univocal, but it is couched mainly in negative terms. But apart from this (what we might call) ‘negative core,’ all other language about God is analogical or accommodated language, with elements of univocity but also with elements of equivocity. Modern discussion recognizes that we readily employ metaphors, similes, and analogies when talking about God; nevertheless, it takes there to be a univocal core that is usually much more extensive than that envisaged by Aquinas or Calvin, for it embraces the entire concept of God. Consequently, when we say that God is wise, or all-good, it is presumed that what is predicated of God has the same meaning as what is predicated of individuals distinct from God. Only in this way, it is believed, can we have a rigorous or philosophically controlled account of our thought about God.<br /><br />Behind this view of language lies a metaphysical thesis that involves a suspicion of, if not an outright rejection of, the idea of divine simplicity and with that a rejection of divine timeless eternity and of any strong sense of divine immutability and divine impassibility. Consequently, much modern philosophical theology takes God to be more human-like than the God of Calvin or Aquinas: he exists in time, he has a memory, he hopes and (perhaps) fears, he acts and reacts to the actions of his creatures. Human language, developed by reference to empirically identifiable states of affairs and the changes they undergo, is not then put under very much strain when it is applied to God.</blockquote>This is far more where I think Calvin is. Helm might have some details wrong, but his basic gist of Calvin's theology 'rings true' of my reading of Calvin. And it's somewhere around here that I think is probably where I should be as well.<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>This allows us to avoid Martin’s creaturely God as well. The incarnation doesn’t reveal the divine nature. It reveals the divine persons - the divine Son in human nature - through whom we meet the Father and the Spirit. Thus we know God personally, and positively - but we don’t know at all what God is in Christ.<br />Therefore, if we are speaking about the nature of God, then I think I am going with your use of language. We are going to be left with an equivocal use of language. Perhaps there is a sense in which the analogia entis will help us. I doubt it, but someone smarter than me will have to figure that out.<br />However, if we are speaking about the persons of God then I am going with Martin. God is a person in the same way that we are because we are created in his image for a personal relationship with him, and because the second person of the trinity took on human flesh, and human language, in order to reveal the Father.</blockquote>Okay. Martin is wrong because the univocal approach ends up with God as a creature. I am wrong because the analogical approach is actually the equivocal approach and ends up with a God about whom we can't say anything with positive content. So the third way is to do one bankrupt approach at one point and the other bankrupt approach at another. We can't say anything at all about God's omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, immutability, aseity, omnipresence and the like. But when it comes to God's love, justice, holiness, goodness and the like then "he is good in precisely the same way we are good," he's a mirror image of us.<br /><br />You've really stessed this because it appears in your next comment to me as well:<br /><blockquote>You are talking about personal categories, and the reason our language about God works so well when we use personal categories is that God is a person. Not in some way different to us being persons. But in exactly the same way that we are persons.</blockquote><blockquote>When Jesus drove the money-changers out of the temple, God was angry in exactly the same way that we are angry (except without sin).</blockquote>There's two basic problems here. First is 'person'. From what I can see, the early church fathers (particularly the Greek speaking ones) didn't even think the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all 'persons' in the same way as each other. One of the Cappadocians (I think) even went so far as to say that there are not Three, but One and One and One. This is because everything that is common to the three persons is part of the being that is common to all three. So if 'personhood' was a quality identical in all three persons, then it would cease to be connected to personhood. 'Father' 'Son' and 'Spirit' aren't three names in the way that John, Jack, and Frank are for three identical persons. They don't simply describe some qualities that three people who are all persons in the same way. They are name the reality that is different between each one so named. If you like, the Father is a person in a fatherly way. The Son is a sonly way. And the Spirit in spiritally way. Contemporary social trinities just ignores this and treats them as though they are a community of three individuals who really really love each. If the three persons of the Godhead were persons in the exact same way we are then you would have tritheism.<br /><br />The other problem is what seems to be there in your 'personal qualities'. God is not loving, angry, good, wise et al. in the same way we are. Our anger could never justify sending someone to Hell, even if it was perfect. God's does. An eternal judgment for sins caused by finite creatures in a finite creation. Jesus' anger towards the money-changers definitely reveals the anger of God towards them, but it hardly exhausts it. They and us wait for judgment day to see that terror unfold.<br /><br />More than that, we acquire goodness, wisdom, love, mercy, justice and the like from outside us. They are qualities we can have more or less of, and acquire from outside ourselves. But Christ is Wisdom. God is love. These aren't just qualities God acquired. God has eternally been identical to these attributes. That's why he's the source of all these things in us and in creation - we acquire them through participation in God. This step in your position goes far beyond anything anyone has alleged about Martin's univocality. This really is to make God's personal qualities - his morality, so to speak - purely and entirely human. I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that this is 'more reformed.'<br /><br />This is where I stretch out my hands from within the folds of my robe, shoot lightning from my fingertips at you and declare, "Feel the power of the <em>analogia entis</em>!"<br /></div>Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-12612373006659126092009-09-04T08:10:00.000-07:002009-09-04T08:34:09.954-07:00Discussion With Tony Payne about theology and ministryI wrote a medium-sized blog entry for the Sola Panel <a href="http://solapanel.org/article/self-knowledge_godliness_and_ministry_part_1/#3893">here</a>. If somehow you've come to this and not via Sola Panel you may want to go and read that first to get the context. The blog prompted a (characteristically) very thoughtful collection of thoughts from Tony Payne. Unfortunately, his comment has now created something of a 'Perfect Storm' in terms of my response. I get the impression he's thinking about it a fair bit (which means I'm inclined to talk longer rather than more briefly) and it touches upon some issues I've been wrestling with for years now (which means I'm inclined to talk longer rather than more briefly....) and Sola Panel is going for a much shorter format than I tend to naturally go for. My <i>comment</i> to Tony is going to be about three times as long as the word limit Sola Panel likes us to aim to go under <i>for our posts</i>. As I didn't want Paul Grimmond virtually thumping me on the back of the head along NCIS lines, I thought I might put the comment here, along with any further disucssion it raises.<br /><br />Even more than normal, this isn't a carefully worked essay. It's a 'comment' and so I suspect that, even more than normal, it more points to connections and conclusions rather than spells them out. Anyway, here it is:<br /><br /> Tony,<br /><br />Thanks for your great reflections and further thinking. Here's a bit more that is very much a work in progress of where I am up to on some of the issues.<br />Tony:<br /><blockquote>When we talk about the knowledge of ‘ourselves’, and the way it both proceeds from and feeds into our knowledge of God, how broad is the category of ‘ourselves’? Does it run to understanding human society and the way our world ‘works’? Does it extend to the way we understand and organize our churches and ministries? </blockquote><br />I think I would answer 'yes' on all these questions. Certainly Calvin seems to be happy to speak of the way churches (and hence minstries) and societies should and should not be organized in book 4 and these imperatives are based upon his understanding of the nature of church, ministry, and society.<br /><br />For where your thinking seems to be going, I’d want to bring in that Calvin is very strong on humanity's innate knowledge of understanding human society, distinguishing this "earthly" class of knowledge from the "heavenly" class of knowledge of God and true righteousness. The quote is from the <i>Institutes</i> Book 2 Chapter 2 and Section 13. I've paragraped it a bit more than the translation I got from the net, to make it easier to read. :)<br /><br /><blockquote> It may therefore be proper, in order to make it more manifest how far our ability extends in regard to these two classes of objects, to draw a distinction between them.<br /><br />The distinction is, that we have one kind of intelligence of earthly things, and another of heavenly things.<br /><br />By earthly things, I mean those which relate not to God and his kingdom, to true righteousness and future blessedness, but have some connection with the present life, and are in a manner confined within its boundaries. By heavenly things, I mean the pure knowledge of God, the method of true righteousness, and the mysteries of the heavenly kingdom.<br /><br />To the former belong matters of policy and economy, all mechanical arts and liberal studies. To the latter (as to which, see the eighteenth and following sections) belong the knowledge of God and of his will, and the means of framing the life in accordance with them.<br /><br />As to the former, the view to be taken is this: Since man is by nature a social animal, he is disposed, from natural instinct, to cherish and preserve society; and accordingly we see that the minds of all men have impressions of civil order and honesty. Hence it is that every individual understands how human societies must he regulated by laws, and also is able to comprehend the principles of those laws. Hence the universal agreement in regard to such subjects, both among nations and individuals, the seeds of them being implanted in the breasts of all without a teacher or lawgiver.</blockquote><br /><br />For where your thinking seems to be going in the latter part of your comment, I think Calvin's statement at the start of the last of the "paragraphs" that I quoted is going to be important. The statement is:<br /><br /><blockquote>Since man is by nature a social animal</blockquote><br /><br />And it is a paraphrase of a statement by Aristotle in his <i>Politics</i> that man is by nature a political animal. It is difficult to imagine that Calvin, being classically trained, didn’t know that he was nodding his head to the great pagan philosopher at this point.<br /><br />So at this point, Calvin’s anthropology involves insights from Scripture integrated with those from pagan philosophy. I’d argue that Calvin does something similar in Book 1 Chapter 15 section 6 where he discusses the faculties of the soul:<br /><br /><blockquote>But I leave it to philosophers to discourse more subtilely of these faculties. For the edification of the pious, a simple definition will be sufficient. I admit, indeed, that what they ingeniously teach on the subject is true, and not only pleasant, but also useful to be known; nor do I forbid any who are inclined to prosecute the study. First, I admit that there are five senses, which Plato (in Theæteto) prefers calling organs, by which all objects are brought into a common sensorium, as into a kind of receptacle: Next comes the imagination (phantasia), which distinguishes between the objects brought into the sensorium: Next, reason, to which the general power of Judgment belongs: And, lastly, intellect, which contemplates with fixed and quiet look whatever reason discursively revolves. In like manner, to intellect, fancy, and reason, the three cognitive faculties of the soul, correspond three appetite faculties—viz. will—whose office is to choose whatever reason and intellect propound; irascibility, which seizes on what is set before it by reason and fancy; and concupiscence, which lays hold of the objects presented by sense and fancy.<br />Though these things are true, or at least plausible, still, as I fear they are more fitted to entangle, by their obscurity, than to assist us, I think it best to omit them. If any one chooses to distribute the powers of the mind in a different manner, calling one appetive, which, though devoid of reason, yet obeys reason, if directed from a different quarter, and another intellectual, as being by itself participant of reason, I have no great objection.</blockquote><br />Here Calvin seems to be broadly endorsing the understanding of human rational faculties that was present in the Greek philosophers, but opting to run with a simplified system for his own exposition. <br /><br />I think this is pretty significant. Calvin at this point is setting up a discussion of the faculties of the soul, which the broader context indicates is actually a discussion of what it means for us to be in the Image of God. And Calvin’s conviction that knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves is related is in large part grounded, I would suggest, on his view that we are in the Image of God. And we find that as Calvin is doing some of the key work of explaining what it means to be human, he brings in insights that are at least partially derived from philosophy, and pagan philosophy at that.<br /><br />And the impression I get is that Calvin saw himself as doing theology the whole way through the <i>Institutes</i>. These aren’t detours into areas that have little to say to ‘true wisdom’. <br /><br />In other words, Calvin seems quite happy to read the Bible in light of insights gleaned by human reason independently from the Bible, even as he is more than happy to critique the insights of human reason in light of what the Bible says. <br /><br />Calvin doesn’t seem to me to think that he has to choose between either reason or revelation, between natural theology and special revelation. And so he, if I had to capture his basic stance towards nonbiblical insights <i>about human beings</i> I’d say something like, “As a whole is a lie, in its parts is wrong the overwhelming majority of the time, but sometimes is both right and so useful that it needs to inform key component of one’s theology.”<br /><br />Part of the reason I say this is because Calvin considers humans better able to reason about themselves than about God and stops only a little short of this in his view about human reason’s knowledge of God:<br /><br /><blockquote> We must now explain what the power of human reason is, in regard to the kingdom of God, and spiritual discernments which consists chiefly of three things—the knowledge of God, the knowledge of his paternal favour towards us, which constitutes our salvation, and the method of regulating of our conduct in accordance with the Divine Law. With regard to the former two, but more properly the second, men otherwise the most ingenious are blinder than moles. I deny not, indeed, that in the writings of philosophers we meet occasionally with shrewd and apposite remarks on the nature of God, though they invariably savour somewhat of giddy imagination. As observed above, the Lord has bestowed on them some slight perception of his Godhead that they might not plead ignorance as an excuse for their impiety, and has, at times, instigated them to deliver some truths, the confession of which should be their own condemnation. Still, though seeing, they saw not. Their discernment was not such as to direct them to the truth, far less to enable them to attain it, but resembled that of the bewildered traveller, who sees the flash of lightning glance far and wide for a moment, and then vanish into the darkness of the night, before he can advance a single step. So far is such assistance from enabling him to find the right path. Besides, how many monstrous falsehoods intermingle with those minute particles of truth scattered up and down in their writings as if by chance. In short, not one of them even made the least approach to that assurance of the divine favour, without which the mind of man must ever remain a mere chaos of confusion. To the great truths, What God is in himself, and what he is in relation to us, human reason makes not the least approach.</blockquote><br /><br />Here, unbiblical knowledge of God is no knowledge at all, because it leaves the person in darkness. Nonetheless there are occasional ‘shrewd’ and ‘apposite’ remarks on the knowledge of God (although even these have a certain flaw about them). So there are elements that are right, but most elements are wrong, and as whole it leaves the person in ignorance of God.<br /><br />So I would want to say that the Reformed tradition that Calvin is an example of is neither Barth nor liberal. It neither says ‘nein’ to natural theology (as Barth did), nor does it see natural theology as an independent field of knowledge, still less as the basis for theology (as liberal theology does). Natural theology, or reason, is a subsidiary authority that functions under the rule of the enscripturated Word of God, just like tradition and experience. But it has a positive role to play, and should not just be the fall guy in constant anti-natural theology polemics. And I think, as much as I’ve grasped this point, I think I’d want to stand with Calvin at this point. This seems to be part of what “Sola Scriptura” meant for him, and I find him a reliable (albeit fallible) exponent of Scripture.<br /><br />All this is prepatory to reflecting on the core of your concern:<br /><blockquote>In other words, is Calvin’s insight (and yours!) a way of thinking about the currently vexed question of pragmatism in Christian ministry?</blockquote><br />To which I think I would say, “definitely.”<br /><blockquote>It seems to me that as I observe those pastors and/or churches that I really admire, they have this constant running interplay between theological principle and smart practice. On the one hand, they are always being driven by the Bible and the gospel and the ‘strategies’ that God himself lays down in Scripture (knowledge of God), and they recognize their utter dependency on these. But on the other hand they keep noticing things about themselves and people and the way church and ministry ‘works’, and adjusting their practice accordingly (knowledge of ourselves). And the two aren’t separate, non-overlapping magisteria. The knowledge of God feeds into and informs the the understanding of people and how they tick, and the understanding of people and how they tick seems only to reinforce and foster more growth in the knowledge of God.<br />This make any sense to you? </blockquote><br />It makes great sense, and I think you are putting your finger on one of the key marks of an effective ministry—one that probably remains true in any culture or time, I suspect. <br />I have a big quibble with how you’ve taken my knowledge of God/knowledge of ourselves in your comment. Calvin’s point is about the <i>object</i> of our knowledge: who and what is known. You seem to have instinctively turned it into a question about the <i>source</i> of our knowledge: how we know. <br />The two are quite separate issues. Almost everything you mention as “knowledge of God” would be for Calvin “knowledge of ourselves”—and it is knowledge derived entirely from special revelation. And everything you mention as “knowledge of ourselves” would also be that for Calvin—but he would see it as knowledge of ourselves that is derived from reason and experience.<br />I may be jumping on a tiny misreading, but it seems to me symbolic of the kind of issue I’m concerned about in the original blog. For us “knowledge of ourselves” is automatically read as ‘nonbiblical’ and “knowledge of God” is read as ‘knowledge the Bible gives us.’ Calvin has two kinds of knowledge and he has two objects of knowledge, which gives his theological project as a whole a robustness and a flexibility to integrate the whole scope of Scripture and speak to the actual world in which sixteenth century Europeans lived—and did so in a way that his exposition has proven edifying for the following four centuries. His theology fitted in the ‘real world’ <i>and</i> it didn’t have to ask for permission to be there—it was ‘Lord.’<br />As far as the recursive aspect of your insight goes, I’m right with you. I think I would possibly look more to a quote from Luther though for that one:<br /><blockquote> 'living, or rather dying and being damned make a theologian, not understanding, reading or speculating'</blockquote><br />True wisdom (Calvin’s term) or being theologian (which I think might be Luther’s equivalent) is to do with living, and life. Both my life personally, and our life corporately. Where a church or a Christian does not engage with the great task of living (which will either include or be the same as ‘ministry’ depending on how one defines the terms) then there can be no growth in true wisdom, or being made into a theologian. So a church or a Christian that is idle will go nowhere in terms of the knowledge of God.<br />But a church or Christian who engages in life apart from the knowledge of God and ourselves that the Word gives us will also go nowhere. A pragmatism that abstracts ends from the gospel, and then sees the getting of those ends as a practical, and not theological, matter can’t be the process for growth in the knowledge of God either. On that view knowing God and serving God must become somewhat hermetically sealed categories it seems to me. <br /><br />Luther points us to an integration of the what and the how. This is partly because he’s fundamentally concerned with the who’s—us and God. And partly because he doesn’t accept a divorce between knowing how to do things, and knowing what the Christian faith teaches. <br />So I see a push to integrate in Calvin and Luther, and to let things sit along side each other as partners: for Calvin it is the object of knowledge (God/us) and the source of knowledge (Scripture/reason). For Luther it is the concern to see the knower and the doer as the same person (a theologian, who is formed by living in the knowledge of God, not so much by study). What we constantly set up as opposites they bring together, in a variety of different relationships.<br /><br />And this breads, especially in Luther, a healthy sense of realism about ministry that verges on pessimism. The Dread Pirate Roberts (actually Wesley, but let’s not quibble) said<br /><blockquote>Life is pain, princess, anyone who tells you differently is selling something.</blockquote><br />Which I think Luther, with his strong view of seeing life under the shadow of the cross would sign off on. If you live life, personally and as a church, under the cross—and by that I mean <i>really</i> live it, live out one’s God given responsibilities (which will involve bringing one’s “A Game” to the question of doing ministry in changing circumstances) then one will be formed as a person who knows God. Either refuse the challenge or find a short cut and you won’t.<br />I think it’s so simple people often grasp it irrespective of IQ or even anyone teaching on it explicitly. And it so cuts against the grain (especially in our context that sees everything as skills that can be taught) that it seems radically counter intuitive.<br /><br />That's a lot of words. I hope there's something in it that made it worth your time to read it. :)Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-45760678277572894922009-01-29T15:09:00.000-08:002009-01-30T14:46:45.526-08:00I think the long, long silence on this blog will probably start to get broken in the coming weeks. On top of that, I am now blogging on Sola Panel for Matthias Media. My first blog is reflecting on the Atheism Bus Campaign and can be found <a href="http://solapanel.org/article/atheism_must_advertise_part_1/">here.</a><br /><p>****</p><p>The British Humanist Association is running a bus campaign. I had heard about it a month or so back and was bemused. I thought the slogan they were running was a bit daft, but only a bit. But recently I saw a bus in Oxford with the advert upon it. You can see a photo of the real thing here: <a href="http://www.atheistbus.org.uk/launchphotos/DSC_0011.JPG">http://www.atheistbus.org.uk/launchphotos/DSC_0011.JPG</a> </p><br />There’s something about seeing such a thing on a bus that helps focus the mind a bit. One sits there and actually thinks over the message and the values that produces such a sign. As a consequence of actually thinking about the humanist association’s advert for a more sustained period of time I no longer think it is a bit daft. I now think it is one of the strangest things I have seen for a long time.<br /><br />To begin with, is just running the advert campaign in the first place. I think it would be hard for Aussies reading this blog to get how disinterested in God the British are. We are used, Down Under, to see ourselves as living in a very secular society. That’s true by any standard of measurement. But the average Australian doesn’t have the almost passive-aggressive indifference towards God that I sense over here. It is almost an active lack of interest, if it is possible to have an active absence. It is almost as though the British find the God question socially embarrassing, and so deal with it by ignoring the question until it shuffles shamefacedly out of the room..... (the rest is over at Sola Panel)Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-52870709723467022922007-12-10T10:15:00.000-08:002007-12-10T11:32:46.349-08:00Problems With Creation Science VI: Must Genesis 1 Be Taken Literally And Without Reference To Science? Part 3This leaves the other prong of the concern. Doesn’t a rejection of a strictly literal reading of Genesis 1-3 (at least, and possibly as far as Chapter 11) mean that the Bible is being subordinated to the findings of modern science? Aren’t evangelicals guilty of changing what the Bible says to fit what science declares about the nature of the world, and doesn’t that ultimately mean that science, not the Bible, calls the shots?<br /><br />Part of what is at issue here is the difference between <em>sola scriptura</em> and what at least some writers have begun calling <em>nudis sciptura</em>.<br /><br />The latter idea moves from the idea that Scripture is the sole authority in the Church to the idea that it has to be interpreted without reference to anything outside it. The best way to read the Bible, which can never be achieved in reality, is to know nothing of the world, have no human thoughts to get in the way, and know nothing of how the Bible has been traditionally understood. The best Bible reader would come to the Bible with a <em>tabula rasa</em> (a blank slate). Traditional readings, readings that fit with what we know of the world, readings that make rational sense are all suspect precisely because they are traditional, fit with the world, and make rational sense. All human knowledge and wisdom just gets in the way of the word of God. (I suspect that this view is part of the cause of the phenomena that Bruce has labelled ‘ClergyBibleWorld’ in his comments on this blog). The Bible should be interpreted in a hermetic vacuum, as far as possible.<br /><br />If such a view does have any pedigree within Protestantism, then I think it should be traced to the Anabaptist end of the spectrum of the 16th Century, than to Calvin, Luther and the like. My growing suspicion is that this wrong view of the nature of Scripture is one of the reasons why the Anabaptists eventually turned on guys like Calvin and Luther and declared them to be a false church as much Rome. Just as the split between the Reformers and Rome was over both the nature of the gospel and the nature of the authority of the Word, so the split between the Reformers and the Anabaptists was over the nature of the gospel and the nature of the authority of the Word.<br /><br />The Magisterial Reformers held to a different view of the nature of the Bible’s authority, and that was <em>sola scriptura</em>. On this view, the Bible is the final authority in the Church. It is the final authority because it alone is the source for theology, for the knowledge of God. Sinful people cannot come to know God except through his word, whatever we may debate about whether creation would have sufficed for Adam and Eve before they ate. However, as was implicit in the Reformers, and was spelled out more explicitly in the centuries after them, the Bible is not intended to be read in a vacuum.<br /><br />Three other authorities exist and serve us in the way we hear the word of God. These are normally stated as Reason, Experience, and Tradition (listed here in no particular order, at least as far as I’m concerned). Unfortunately, as Liberalism has gotten a stronger hold on much of Church life in the West, there is often talk of the ‘Wesleyan Quadrilateral’ or the ‘Lambeth Quadrilateral’. This is unfortunate, because it often gives the impression (wrongly in my view) that Scripture is just one of four equally ranked authorities, and so can be trumped by another authority in theology. Classically, Scripture is the <em>sole</em> authority when it comes to the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of salvation. The other three exist to serve us as we receive and submit to that authority. They themselves are ruled <em>by</em> Scripture.<br /><br />However, I would suggest that there are several things to note with this basic position on the relationship between Scripture on the one hand, and Reason, Experience, and Tradition on the other.<br /><br /><br /><ol><li>Each of the three subordinate authorities are authorities in their own right when it comes to issues of life in this world that are <em>not</em> part of knowing God and are part of their ‘portfolio’. It is entirely right and proper for one country to enjoy pasta while another enjoys potatoes. One country can adopt a Parliamentary Democracy, another an Athenian, and still another a Presidential (and seeing democracy is almost unquestioned these days, it’s worth saying that another country can be undemocratic) and it be a valid form of government. In areas such as national foods and styles of governments you’re in the realm of Tradition. If you’re pursuing logical arguments, philosophy, or mathematical theorems, then Reason is King. And experience is a powerful authority—Proverbs itself indicates that it is a mark of the fool and the simple that they do not learn life lessons from the events in their lives.<br /><br />Science, like the Arts, doesn’t really fit neatly into this schema, which shows that the Tradition/Reason/Experience break-up is not an infallible tool, and shouldn’t be used as a Procrustean Bed where everything is shoved into one and only one category. Science is a community of shared and inherited wisdom that rationally reflects upon experience. It makes use of all three categories as it undertakes its endeavours. Nonetheless, what this suggests is that there is a right and proper domain where Science is King, and where its findings should not be challenged by the Word of God. Because God has set up the world so that the Word of God isn’t the sole authority about everything in the world.</li><br /><br /><li>Because the Bible speaks <em>about</em> the world and about life in the world, what it says about such matters are a source for other disciplines. The Bible’s descriptions of events and cultural practices in the history books of the OT and NT can be validly used by history and even such disciplines as psychology and anthropology. Much of the wisdom of Proverbs (so the commentators assure me, I’ve never learned another dead language to check it out for myself) have parallels in the traditional wisdom of other people groups—some aspects of living wisely in this world are part of common grace, even as the Bible issues them as part of its special revelation. And I’d want to hold that when the Bible does say things on such matters that are part of the ‘portfolio’ of other disciplines or spheres, it does so without error (which for me is a distinguishing feature of inerrancy as opposed to infallibility).</li><br /><br /><li>Because the Bible is a book that is entangled in this world, in that it isn’t speaking of some ideal world hovering above our world, or some kind of ‘spiritual truth’ that bears no reference to the world we live in, it can <em>in principle</em> be overthrown by a challenge from one of the three subordinate authorities. If Jesus’ bones were discovered tomorrow I would cease to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. As a result I would reject the entire NT at least (I’d then have to look carefully at Judaism). Irrespective of what Scripture said, Jesus can’t have risen from the dead if Jesus’ bones are still in the ground. At this point Scripture’s claims hang upon the reality of the world matching the state of affairs that the NT describes. While not the focus of Paul’s words in 1 Cor 1:1-19, it does seem to me that Paul is implicitly acknowledging this point. Paul doesn’t respond to what appears to be a view going around the Corinthian Church that there will be no resurrection from the dead by simply stating that Christ rose and that, as the Word of God says it, it must be believed. He points out the different witnesses who could all independently testify. The logic of his argument suggests that if many or most of them came back and said, ‘actually this whole thing is a fabrication’ then Paul would be found to have testified falsely of God.<br /><br />In other words, even the <em>heart</em> of the Christian faith is ‘vulnerable’ to an attack from our knowledge of the world. Which is why Christians have taken a lot of interest in the historicity of the Gospels.<br /><br />And I think that’s a good thing. Ideas and beliefs that are not falsifiable <em>even in principle</em> are not genuine views of the world. They’re conspiracy theories. Human knowledge is knowledge of finite creatures, which means it is never free from the possibility of error, or the need to repent. Part of the great strength of Christianity is that it is at least theoretically able to be falsified, and so reflects the nature of human knowledge. (And if you think that has anything going for it, you’ve got an easy answer to the solipstic concern of ‘what if I’m a brain in vat and I’m just hallucinating all this’ <em>a la</em> <em>The Matrix</em>. The doubt can’t be falsified, which means it is automatically suspect. You can avoid Descartes’ attempt to locate an absolutely certain foundation to build all knowledge upon, and accept that human knowledge, like human beings, is limited.)</li><br /><br /><li>Finally, there is a place for the subsidiary authorities to serve us in the way we understand Scripture. We do read the Bible in certain ways because the Word uses Reason, or Tradition, or Experience to teach us to read it that way. I’ll offer two examples, neither of which, it has to be said, are uncontroversial. However, even if neither specific example is accepted by someone, they should still illustrate the general point sufficiently for it to be grasped.<br /><br />The first is the issue of the law of non-contradiction. A cannot be non-A. An idea cannot be right and wrong simultaneously in the same sense. (For example, it can’t be the case that 1+1=2 <em>and</em> that 1+1=3 given standard bases and the like). It seems to me that the Bible presupposes this very basic law of rational thought throughout. Because the Bible regularly argues that ‘Because X, therefore Y’. If things could be both true and false simultaneously then <em>no</em> rational argument has any force. No rational argument would have any force because the argument could be true and false at the same time. And one could legitimately draw both one conclusion and the opposite conclusion at the same time from the same premise. The fact that the Bible argues that ‘because X, therefore Y’ is implicit testimony to the validity of the law of non-contradiction.<br /><br />Guys like Tertullian, Luther and Barth all probably rejected the law of non-contradiction either due to a radical view of God’s omnipotence or a radical view of the noetic effects of sin. Nonetheless, in practice Bible scholars recognise the law of non-contradiction whenever they say, “This view cannot be right, because it <em>contradicts</em> what the Bible says over here.” Without the law of non-contradiction, a contradiction would not be a good reason to reject something. In other words, the Bible is rightly read when it is read in a rational way.<br /><br />The second example is the doctrine of the Trinity. Christians today learn to read the Bible to see how it teaches the Trinity. It happens fairly naturally and tends to be taken for granted. But it is a gift to us from the first five or so centuries of Christians. It took hundreds of years to work together a clear grasp of what the Scriptures were saying, and there were a lot of mistakes made along the way—and not just by the heretics, even what the orthodox theologians said in most of the centuries leading up to Nicaea can make one’s hair stand on end. We avoid those struggles and difficulties precisely because of tradition. We pick up where earlier Christians left off.<br /><br />Most people find that the more they sit with Scripture, the more they see, the more connections they perceive, the more implications shine through. Tradition works like that on a bigger scale. The whole people of God pass on an inheritance to the next generation that enables them to see more than if they had to start again from scratch. And this is why the Church’s historic understanding of doctrines and passages needs to be respected and taken seriously. It is not to be taken as automatically right—the Reformation showed just how badly off track the Church could get. But it does need to be recognised as a gift from God to us for our good and accepted as such.</li></ol><br /><br />It is this last point about subsidiary authorities serving us in our reading of Scripture that I think is the key one for the issue of reading Genesis in the light of science. Generally speaking, Creationists tend to give just two options. Either Genesis one and two are historical accounts that are roughly analogous to modern historical accounts and so are eyewitness narratives. Or they’re false, and the Bible isn’t what it claims to be. It is pitched as a basic conflict between science and Scripture.<br /><br />But this setting up of an opposition doesn’t take into account that our knowledge of the world is <em>supposed</em> to be something that helps guide our reading of the Bible. I’ll offer four examples that I hope will illustrate the point:<br /><br />First, there is the following statement by Jesus:<br /><br /><blockquote>Matthew 19:23-24 And Jesus said to His disciples, "Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. "Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."</blockquote><br />There are two basic options here. Either Jesus is using some kind of poetic device when talking about a camel going through the eye of a needle, or he’s speaking of an actual physical gate in Jerusalem known as the Needle Gate, where it was difficult to get a fully laden camel through. It’s either a historical reference or it isn’t.<br /><br />It seems to me the only way such an exegetical decision can be made is to allow what we know of the world to shape our reading of Jesus’ words. There is no evidence anywhere (last time I checked) of a gate referred to as either “The Eye of the Needle” or “The Needle Gate” in Jerusalem. And so most people take it that Jesus’ words here are a metaphor, they aren’t speaking of a gate <em>because we know from sources outside the Bible that no such gate existed</em>.<br /><br />We could, however, run the standard Creationist arguments used for Genesis 1 at this point:<br /><br /><ul><li>Jesus was actually there, modern historians aren’t.</li><br /><li>Surely Jesus’ words can be trusted, for he says, “I am the truth”.</li><br /><li>Just because there is no evidence that it existed, there is nothing that says categorically that it <em>didn’t</em> exist.</li><br /><li>Human beings (modern historians, Jesus’ contemporaries) have evil hearts and so their views can’t be trusted.</li></ul><br />And so we conclude that there really was a Needle Gate, and we can only trust the Bible for this knowledge of the world.<br /><br />Once again, there’s nothing in Jesus’ words that indicate that it is a metaphor. The only way you can decide it is, is if you think that our knowledge of the world has a legitimate role in determining how we are to understand the Bible. At this point most of us work from our knowledge of the world, to how we read Jesus’ words: <em>Because</em> we know there’s no Needle Gate <em>therefore</em> it must be a metaphor.<br /><br />The second is Paul’s words to Timothy:<br /><blockquote>1 Timothy 5:23 No longer drink water exclusively, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.</blockquote>How again are we supposed to take such words? They’re in the Bible, so they must give some kind of reliable information about the world. I’d suggest that if we took the kind of view that seems implicit in creationism’s arguments then we should see this as important medical advice, and would hold that regularly taking a little wine is an important aspect of dealing with frequent ailments. Sickly people should regularly drink some wine.<br /><br />Let’s run the arguments again: Who knows the human body better? Doctors, or God who made the body? This isn’t poetry, it’s a statement about an actual historical Timothy and his actual historical stomach. It’s either reliable medical information or it’s false, and so the Bible’s claims about itself fall to the ground. And who should Christian doctors or modern Christians receiving medical advice believe? God? Or unbelieving modern medicine?<br /><br />If we knew <em>nothing</em> about wine or about ailments, then I’d suggest we’d probably take Paul’s words as offering a reliable way to better health for the sickly. Our instincts (quite rightly) are to see the implications of what the Bible says as widely as possible. We don’t see these words as normative counsel on dealing with ailments simply because we allow our knowledge of medicine to shape how we take Paul’s words. And so we see it as advice for Timothy in particular, or as like much folk medicine of earlier centuries, capturing something, but not the final answer on dealing with ailments.<br /><br />The third is the relationship of the sun and the earth:<br /><br /><blockquote>Joshua 10:12-14 Then Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, "O sun, stand still at Gibeon, And O moon in the valley of Aijalon." So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, Until the nation avenged themselves of their enemies. Is it not written in the book of Jashar? And the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day. There was no day like that before it or after it, when the LORD listened to the voice of a man; for the LORD fought for Israel.</blockquote><blockquote>Psalm 19:4-6 In them He has placed a tent for the sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber; It rejoices as a strong man to run his course. Its rising is from one end of the heavens, And its circuit to the other end of them; And there is nothing hidden from its heat.</blockquote>I suggest that if we had <em>no</em> knowledge of astronomy, and were looking to the Bible to give reliable astronomical information, then the most natural way to read these two passages is as they straightforwardly appear. The sun moves around the earth in the same way the moon does. The psalm fairly clearly presupposes that the sun runs a course each day. And the Joshua passage draws a parallel between the sun stopping and the moon stopping, which would, if you hadn’t already known about the earth being a sphere that rotates, suggest that both sun and moon move around the earth in the same way. And it occurs in a historical narrative, where the narrator himself (and not just Joshua) says that the sun stopped.<br /><br />There’s nothing in the text that suggests that such descriptions should not be taken in a strictly literal sense. We could run the same creationist arguments again (but I’ll spare you, you should be able to do it yourself now), and show how here too we have a conflict between what the Word of God declares and what Science declares and so we have to choose who we’ll believe: God or the unbelieving astronomer. As far as I can see, the only reason why someone doesn’t take such descriptions literally is that:<br /><br />a) they don’t think that the Bible is particularly concerned to give good astronomical insights<br /><br />b) they read these statements in light of what they already know about the world.<br /><br />And so we conclude (quite rightly) that such descriptions are not intended to give a strictly literal account of ‘what actually happened’. It speaks of historical realities, but not with an eye to teach good astronomy.<br /><br />In this sense, it’s a bit like Judges 4 and 5, our final example. Both chapters relate the same event: the overthrow of Sisera’s dominion over Israel and his death at the hands of Jael and a trusty hammer-and-tent peg combination. Chapter 5 is a song that, by and large, seems to be retracing the event in fairly historical terms, not in metaphors. But then we get statements like the following thrown in: <blockquote>Judges 5:4-5 LORD, when You went out from Seir, When You marched from the field of Edom, The earth quaked, the heavens also dripped, Even the clouds dripped water. The mountains quaked at the presence of the LORD, This Sinai, at the presence of the LORD, the God of Israel.</blockquote><blockquote>Judges 5:20-21 The stars fought from heaven, From their courses they fought against Sisera. The torrent of Kishon swept them away, The ancient torrent, the torrent Kishon. O my soul, march on with strength.</blockquote>Like other details that we would consider more obviously historical, these lines in the song these words don’t relate to anything we find in the account in chapter four. So what do we do with them? Some commentators will try and suggest that there were some miracles that occurred in the battle—particularly that the river Kishon swept away some of Sisera’s forces. Their reason seems to be, as far as I can see, that the song overall reads like a historical account. And hence, they slot it into the historical genre and so look for some kind of strictly literal referent to these words. But that just seems a bit odd given what we know about the historical event from chapter 4. If God had entered the field of battle in some kind of physical manifestation, why would he call for a small army of human warriors? Why go for a miracle with the Kishon river getting involved, but not also argue the same about the stars joining in the battle?<br /><br />For me, such a feature of the song suggests that the Bible doesn’t always draw the strong distinction between ‘historical fact’ and ‘theological interpretation’ that we have inherited from the Enlightenment. The Bible recounts the past to tell us about God and about how to live. It’s not interested in the past for the past’s sake. And so what is for us two separate steps: what happened, and what it means, are often interwoven in the Bible. And sometimes the meaning is more highlighted than the historical reporting. This means, I would suggest, that the Bible does at times not follow principles that <em>we</em> consider important for a factual account.<br /><br />You can see this in the way in which it is hard to reconcile the different accounts of who saw what at Jesus’ tombs in Matthew, Luke, and John. Matthew says there was one angel, Luke and John says two. John gives the impression that Mary was on her own, Matthew and Luke name the other women who were with her. John indicates that Mary saw the angels and Jesus <em>after</em> fetching Peter and John. Matthew implies that the women saw the angel and Jesus before going to see the disciples. And Luke tells us that the women saw two angels (and doesn’t mention seeing Jesus) before they went and fetched the disciples.<br /><br />Again, I think such discrepancies can be reconciled. But such discrepancies don’t fit the way <em>we</em> tell history. We wouldn’t accept saying there was one angel if there was two. Nor would we be all that inclined to pass over the fact that the women saw Jesus if we were giving an orderly account (you mentioned that the women saw angels, but passed over the fact that they saw <em>Jesus</em>? Just what sort of account is this?). Such features reflect an approach to history that subordinates just recounting facts for a broader purpose in showing the <em>the meaning</em> of the events. That such surface discrepancies arise, shows that the Bible’s concern isn’t to give us our kind of account of ‘how things really happened’. There’s more options in the Bible’s reporting than either ‘absolutely precise history’ or ‘false’, and they have to ascertained on a case by case basis.<br /><br />(If you want my take on Genesis 1-11 in a nutshell, that’s pretty well it. I think it’s historical, but is an account that is speaking of the historical reality it narrates first and foremost in terms of its meaning. And this means, like Apocalyptic, or like Judges 5, the details mightn’t be historical records in <em>our</em> sense of ‘historical’.)<br /><br />In other words, there is nothing wrong with reading the Bible in light of what we know about the world from other sources. Every time we appeal to archaeological findings, or even turn to a Greek lexicon to ascertain what a word meant, we are reading the Bible in light of our knowledge of the world. There’s nothing wrong with doing that. The Bible is designed to be read that way, that’s how its authority is supposed to be expressed over us.<br /><br />Our knowledge of the world is <em>supposed</em> to serve us, by guiding us to read the Bible rightly, and this is part of what it means to correctly understand the nature of the Bible’s authority. <em>Sola scriptura</em> not <em>nudis scriptura</em>.<br /><br />To sum up:<br /><br />What this means is that the relationship between the Bible on the one hand, and experience, tradition, and reason on the other is not simply dictator to functionaries. The Bible has a central concern. The <em>Westminster Shorter Catechism</em> calls it the principal teaching of the Scriptures:<br /><blockquote>Q. 3. What do the Scriptures principally teach?<br />A. The Scriptures principally teach, what man is to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of man.</blockquote>In this kind of area, then Scripture speaks fairly much on its own. It gives us the knowledge of God, and how we are to live so as to please God.<br /><br />But Scripture also makes statements that bear upon the world we live in. In those areas where Scripture speaks to spheres where other authorities have a legitimate role, there is more give and take between what we <em>think</em> the Bible is saying, and what we know (acknowledging that human knowledge is fallible) about the world from other sources. Despite what creationists claim, this is not, in itself, a liberal failure of nerve about the Bible. It is recognising that the Bible has its own area of concern, as the <em>Westminster Shorter Catechism </em>indicates, and so what it says focuses on that sphere.<br /><br />Each case of an apparent conflict between what we thought the Bible was saying and what we think of the nature of the world therefore needs to be addressed on its merits. God hasn’t promised the church that it would get everything right in its reading of the Bible. And science is anything but infallible (and scientific popularises have a long history of using the respect that science is held in to claim certain views as 'scientific' that are outside the field of science).<br /><br />In seeking to address such tensions, I’d suggest the test that should be applied is not some criteria of literalness. I’d suggest that the proper test is theological, because that respects the fact that the Bible’s primary teaching is the knowledge of God and how to live. Does a possible revision of our understanding of the Bible’s teaching about the world undermine our knowledge of God in Christ Jesus or what it means to walk in the light? If so, then that needs to be resisted. If not, then the proper domain of science needs to be respected.<br /><br />Such a test doesn’t force an issue—in practice literary features of the text, tradition, knowledge of the world, how such a text is treated by other parts of Scripture, and the implications of a possible reading for the Bible’s teaching as a whole are all going to be factors that will need to be weighed. Someone, could, in my view, weigh everything up and still decide that Genesis 1 is a fairly strictly literal account of things.<br /><br />Nonetheless, the basic point from this should (hopefully) be clear. There’s nothing wrong with a reading of the Bible arising because we know something about the world that we didn’t before. There’s no such <em>a priori</em> formal law that governs the word of God. Each case must be looked at on its own merits. And so, for example, it can be entirely consistent to accept current scientific consensus about cosmological age and biological evolution on the one hand, and reject homosexual practice on the other.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-40209607804688497912007-12-08T06:28:00.000-08:002007-12-08T06:42:51.001-08:00Problems With Creation Science VI: Must Genesis 1 Be Taken Literally And Without Reference To Science? Part 2Part of the nature of language is its robustness. We can do a lot with it. In Western contexts we tend to prize precision, accuracy, and clarity in speech and writing. The more serious the context—making laws, academia—the more language rules prioritise these values. Hence, we tend not to use highly ornate patterns of speech, because having such features tends to get in the way of clearly saying exactly what we mean with little room for misunderstanding. We aim for maximum light, even though it tends to mean that such communication in less compelling and less moving for the recipient. People know what we are saying, but they aren’t caught up in why it matters. It’s a very safe way of communicating, because there’s little ambiguity (at least that’s the ideal), but it also tends to have all the impact of overcooked pasta.<br /><br />The Bible, overall, doesn’t adopt those values in the way it uses language. It tends to use a more risky strategy. Jesus says, ‘If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.’ Or the Gospel records Jesus telling a rich young ruler ‘sell all you have and give it to the poor, then come follow me’—and doesn’t try to include an explanatory note with it to avoid the multitude of misunderstandings such a bald statement can (and has) witnessed. Even someone who can seem as straightforward and expository as Paul can still leave many of his key concepts sufficiently unexplained so as to leave room for multiple disagreements about all kinds of aspects of Pauline theology.<br /><br />I’m not for a moment suggesting that the Bible is a wax nose that can be twisted in any direction each reader likes. I think the Bible has a fixed meaning and is able to be understood on its own terms. But it is also the case that most English speaking thinkers of the last two centuries don’t generate the kind of interpretative debates as to what they meant that the Bible does. The Bible does not spell itself out at every point and guide the reader by the hand past every possible area of difficulty, the way we tend to think a speaker or writer should. It does not aim for clarity (in our sense) at the expense of every other resource that language offers. Often it uses strategies that run the risk of misunderstanding, but have a huge pay-off in terms of their effect upon the reader, like our Lord’s hyperbole. The Bible is written throughout in a way that makes it hard for the reader to hold themselves at arm’s length from what is being said. It makes demands, it speaks in a way that is not the detached, clear, precise academic giving a lecture, but the cutting words of a soldier’s blade or a surgeon’s scalpel, whose work is messy and lacks detachment.<br /><br />The principle of reading literally unless one can’t, which I think is implicit in the way a lot of creationism attacks other ways of reading Genesis 1, just isn’t faithful to this aspect of Scripture’s nature. I suggest that it mistakes the idea of Scripture’s <em>clarity</em> with an idea of Scripture’s <em>transparency</em>. The latter idea is what I think most people tend to think is meant by Scripture’s clarity. And it’s usually something like, “The Bible should be fairly easily understood at almost all points when it is picked up by an average reader.” While popular, that’s never really what ‘clarity of Scripture’ was ever intended to mean.<br /><br />The clarity of Scripture means something more like, “The Bible can be understood sufficiently to give people all they need for faith in Christ and to live for him”. This idea rejects the position that the Bible is so obscure as a whole that it needs an authoritative interpreter to stand between it and the reader (like the Church Magisterium as in Roman Catholicism). It holds that the Bible has a central message, a central concern, and this can be reliably ascertained by an average reader. Hence people can read the Bible for themselves, come to faith, and begin to live a life of discipleship.<br /><br />However, the clarity of Scripture also includes a degree of realism about the nature of Scripture. It contains both the idea that some parts of the Bible will remain obscure—like Paul’s mention of the practice of baptising for the dead—as well as the idea that understanding the Bible properly at some points will need a lot of work and a lot of ability. This is why Evangelicalism has traditionally, going back to the Reformers, been committed to an educated clergy who were capable in the original languages. (I’d suggest that the exchange of the idea of the clarity of Scripture for the idea of the transparency of Scripture has often been behind moves to eliminate language learning for clergy among Evangelicals). In other words, the idea of the clarity of Scripture has the idea that not all the Bible is equally clear, which means both that there is a place for teachers, and a place for sustained hard work by everyone.<br /><br />And it is the last point that I would suggest is the real pay-off from the Bible’s communication strategy. Precisely the fact that parts of the Bible need work to understand, or have more to offer if you go back over them, is part of what gives the Bible that unique capability it has to never be exhausted. Christians find that it always has more to offer, and that as their life experience changes it often sheds light in new and unexpected ways. In that sense, the whole Bible has the character of a parable or proverb. It’s not easy to unlock its meaning, and so it invites the reader to come back and chew on it some more, always generating the nagging feeling that “I haven’t quite gotten it yet.” That is, it is precisely <em>because</em> the Bible isn’t safe it is inexhaustible. The two go together.<br /><br />But that wildness or lack of safe domesticity to the Bible is a problem for human beings. We like to be in control. We like to have rules to appeal to that govern those who have authority over us. If we must have monarchies we want them to be constitutional. Yet the word of God is a monarchy in the Church, it is the means by which Christ rules his people. And so it is a recurring feature in the Church that people try to form abstract rules that determine how we are to interpret the Bible. The Pharisees’ traditions that sought to place a hedge around the law have been repeated often throughout the millennia, as people sought to place interpretative hedges around the word of God.<br /><br />And so, in the present, it is not uncommon for Evangelicals to try and create rules that govern how we can read the Bible and so regulate the different debates we find ourselves embroiled in. When I was in my teens, for example, it was common for evangelicals to argue that Pentecostals were wrong because history books in the Bible (like Acts) must be interpreted in light of the Epistles. But Acts isn’t just a modern style history that relates events without any sense of a message, a theology, that it is seeking to teach. There is a genuine sense in which Acts is just as self-interpreting as Romans or 1 Peter. Evangelicalism, like much of the modern Christian world in the West, is almost paralysed by its concern to get its rules right, as though the problems and disagreements have arisen just because we haven’t perfected the right methodology for reading the Bible.<br /><br />Into such a context Martin Luther’s little statement seems almost wilfully obtuse (and didn’t you just know that Luther was going to make a showing again…):<br /><blockquote>Moreover, I cannot bear with laws for the interpretation of the word of God, since the word of God, which teaches liberty in all other things, ought not to be bound.</blockquote>These words appear in the open letter to Pope Leo X that prefaces Luther’s short, but amazing, work <em>On the Freedom of the Christian</em>. Luther is stating his willingness to let the debate over justification abate in the interest of peace in the church. He offers only two conditions on his offer of not continuing to publish on the matter. The first is that he won’t retract what he’s said—his silence is in the interests of peace, it’s not a backdown.<br /><br />The other condition is what I’ve just quoted.<br /><br />In other words, for Luther, this statement about no fixed rules for the interpretation of God’s word is on a par with the truth of justification by grace alone through faith alone. (No surprise there, Christ’s role as the sole Saviour who saves through the gospel, and his role as the sole Lord of the Church who rules through Scripture are intertwined). And like so many of Luther’s quotable quotes, it uses the risky approach to language. It’s easy to misconstrue, or even abuse, what he’s saying here. (I came across an internet article by an American Lutheran that indicated that Liberals within Lutheranism appealed to this statement by Luther in the 70s to justify their fundamentally unbelieving stance against Scripture).<br /><br />Nonetheless, precisely because of that risky strategy in communicating, Luther makes his point powerfully. Coming up with <em>a priori</em> laws that govern the interpretation of the word of God cannot be squared with the word of God’s own fundamental nature. The word of God is the very essence of freedom, for it liberates us from our bondage and, ‘teaches liberty in all other things’. You can’t bind something like that.<br /><br />What you can offer are principles or guidelines that work by and large, like the grammatico-historico method, or the fundamentally christo-centric nature of the OT (and the New…). But these can only be after the fact (<em>a posteori</em>), and they can only be rules of thumb, not laws. We learn to interpret the Bible by listening to it first and foremost, and paying attention to what it says. It’s not a matter of ironing out an ironclad methodology that we then apply to it.<br /><br />At this point, I’m probably trying to restate things I think I said far more clearly (and with less words!) back in the post <a href="http://reflectionsinexile.blogspot.com/2007/10/scriptural-interpretation.html">Scriptural Interpretation</a>. Nonetheless, I’ll play it again Sam.<br /><br />It seems to me that when the Bible speaks explicitly to the issue of how to interpret it and how not to interpret it, we get statements like the following:<br /><br /><blockquote>2 Peter 3:15-18 …and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation; just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction. You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, be on your guard so that you are not carried away by the error of unprincipled men and fall from your own steadfastness, but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory, both now and to the day of eternity. Amen.</blockquote><blockquote>James 1:21-25 Therefore, putting aside all filthiness and all that remains of wickedness, in humility receive the word implanted, which is able to save your souls. But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was. But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in what he does.</blockquote><br />The problem of wresting Scripture, or of not receiving the implanted word, has been with us since the Apostolic era. And the apostles do <em>not</em> give us a technique that, if followed, would guarantee an end to such interpretative cul de sacs. What they suggest is that the issue is found at a deeper level than methodology. It is an issue of the heart.<br /><br />Hearing the word of God, correctly understanding the hard to understand things in Paul and the rest of Scripture, is fundamentally a moral and spiritual issue. The word of God will provide its own path for us to understand it. It is the light that lightens our darkness. It doesn’t need rules to shed the light upon it. The issue of biblical interpretation is fundamentally whether we are prepared to hear and obey the word of God. And that’s it. No silver bullet. No magic answer that, if followed, means we’ll never put a foot wrong interpretatively. We just have to trust the word of God itself to lead us into all truth. We are shut up to the Word of God alone. We have no other resource when it comes to the knowledge of God.<br /><br />And, so we’re under no illusions, we can be fairly sure that God <em>won’t</em> give us exhaustive knowledge of everything the Bible teaches. We’ll get it wrong. Because every teacher that God has given the Church has disagreed with another teacher at some point. Which means that, at a minimum, <em>all but one</em> was wrong somewhere. So the idea that God is offering us an encyclopaedic knowledge of his ways, that often seems entailed by the transparency view of Scripture, is just ridiculous. <em>We</em> are the darkness that the Word shines its light upon.<br /><br />So, if we have ‘demythologised’ the early chapters of Genesis (which is not the wording <em>I’d</em> choose, but I’ll pick up the words Michael’s offered), what keeps us from it becoming the thin edge of the wedge? What stops us from demythologising more broadly? Absolutely nothing. And absolutely everything. The word of God itself will teach us how to hear it, just as it has already begun to teach us in the way it brought us to faith in Christ. We are to read each part of Scripture in the way that it itself invites us to read it. ‘Literally’ when we think that is obedient, ‘non-literally’ when we think that is faithful hearing. It’s not a matter of consistency within our abstract systems of thought first and foremost (although I’ll acknowledge that that’s not an irrelevant consideration). First and foremost we need to grasp that the word of God is <em>self</em>-interpreting. Because it is the <em>sole</em> instrument whereby Christ rules us. The words disclose the reality they speak of. It's not technique that prevents unbelief, it's the power of the word of God itself that creates faith.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-78800072665126888782007-12-08T04:56:00.000-08:002007-12-08T05:20:30.739-08:00Problems With Creation Science VI: Must Genesis 1 Be Taken Literally And Without Reference To Science? Part 1Perhaps the biggest issue for many Christians with a high view of the Bible is the concern about not reading Genesis chapter one literally. For people like me, who are inerrantists, and not just infalliblists, the problem is particularly acute. I don’t believe the Bible is wrong in <em>anything</em> that it teaches.<br /><br />If that’s the case, the creationist asks, then why not read Genesis 1 as what it clearly seems to be: a straightforward historical account like any other in the Bible? Isn’t this a clear example of one’s nerve failing and finding a way to get the Bible to say what fits with modern science? And, I’ve heard it regularly suggested, this is the Achilles heel. If when people open their Bible, they explain away the <em>first</em> thing God says, the statement about origins, then the whole foundation is destroyed. It’s irrelevant if you take anything else literally, because it’s got no foundations to support it.<br /><br />As I’ve heard it put (again a paraphrase from memory, not a direct quote):<br /><br /><blockquote>What more would God have need to have done to get across the point that chapter one is meant to be taken literally?</blockquote>When the issue is put that way it is extremely powerful. (I should know, for I’ve used it with Jehovah’s Witnesses on the issue of the personhood of the Holy Spirit when looking at texts that speak of the Holy Spirit in a personal way.) It’s powerful because it <em>is</em> a good principle—it’s a way of trying to get at what the Reformers would call ‘the natural sense’ of a text: reading it in a way that isn’t too clever by half, but seems ‘natural’. What <em>could</em> God have done to flag any more clearly that this is a straightforward historical account?<br /><br />This is one of the few genuinely valuable things that I think Creationism throws up—how do we understand the nature of Scripture, and so what does it mean to be a faithful hearer of the Word of God? So this is going to be a fairly wide-ranging discussion. (Which means, expect more thought for further reflection rather than settled answers by the end of this post.)<br /><br />We’ll begin with the question of whether chapter one is self-evidently a historical narrative. As I’ve already indicated in earlier posts, I think there are features of chapter one that are not taken literally (at least, not taken literally by people with any kind of orthodox theology). Some examples of these are:<br /><ol><li>The deep waters of verse 2 existing <em>before</em> God says anything in verse 3.</li><br /><li>The fact that in verse 2 ‘darkness’ exists <em>before</em> God says anything in verse 3 to create anything which <em>could be</em> dark. (After all, you can’t have darkness without space, and space—physical dimensions—is one of those things that is created in verses 3 and following).</li><br /><li>The firmament separating the waters above from the waters below in verses 6-8, which is an expanse in which floodgates are opened in 7:11 to bring about the Flood.</li><br /><li>The fact that all celestial objects only exist to give light and regulate human time in verses 14-18.</li><br /><li>The fact that the seventh day doesn’t end. It’s quite noticeable, if you have your eyes open. Every day has the same refrain:<br /><br />And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.<br />And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.<br />And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.<br />And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.<br />And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.<br />And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.<br />And there was evening and there was morning, the seventh day.<br /><br />No wait. My mistake. Scratch the last one. The refrain is <em>not</em> repeated on the seventh day, the day when God rests from his labours of creating. It is repeated six times and then missed out on the seventh day.<br /><br />Creationists make much of this refrain: evening and morning, to stress that this has to mean actual, historical 24 hour days. (And I don’t disagree, the days in chapter one are 24 hours, they aren’t ages or the like. The issue is, is this a strict historical account?)<br /><br />And yet, the seventh day has no evening and morning, it does not end. Why not give that its due weight? Why not take that just as strictly literally? Hold to the view that the <em>seventh</em> day wasn’t twenty four hours, and a week is made up of six twenty-four days and we rest on the seventh, indeterminately long, day.<br /><br />Or acknowledge, that this another piece of evidence that suggests that the account mightn’t be intended to be taken in a highly literal way.</li><br /><li>Finally, as has been pointed out, the account of chapter one and the account of chapter two are difficult to reconcile. The most probable scenario is that <em>at least</em> one has to be not providing a strictly literal historical account. And I would argue that chapter two ‘feels’ similar to chapter one. One could ask the same question: What more would God have to do to make it clear that the account in chapter two is meant to be taken literally? In fact, chapter two is fairly free of the kind of features that I’ve just highlighted from chapter one, so it’s got <em>more</em> grounds for being taken as a strictly literal historical account.</li></ol>Now none of this <em>proves</em> that we must <em>not</em> read Genesis 1 in a strictly literal fashion. As I’ve said, looked at as an internal question of reading the Bible in the abstract, I think a literal reading of chapter one is a respectable position.<br /><br />But what it should do is indicate that there are features of chapter one that <em>no-one</em> should take literally. And if that’s the case, it is not as simple as ‘good guys read this literally’ and ‘bad guys explain it away’. <em>All</em> of us recognise that faithfully hearing this chapter as the Word of God involves not taking all the features in a strict literal sense. And if that’s the case, then a less strictly literal reading does not necessarily signify a weakening of trust in God’s Word.<br /><br />But where does this approach stop? If Genesis 1 or 2 is going to be taken in a less strictly literal sense, what basis can you give for not sitting loosely on other things that seem to run counter to modern wisdom? After all, creationists generally tend to argue that if Genesis 1 goes, you’ve basically lost everything.<br /><br />Here I want to start with an issue that I’m indebted to Tony Payne of Matthias Media for raising in <em>The Briefing</em>. In a kind of sidebar argument in an issue dedicated to Intelligent Design he drew an analogy between the current debate over whether Genesis 1 has to be taken literally to the debate between Luther and Zwingli over the Lord’s Supper. I’m going to use the issue a bit differently here than how he did, but I’m indebted to him for drawing the link between the two issues to my attention.<br /><br />The issue relates to the words of institution of the Lord’s Supper as recorded in the three Synoptic Gospels:<br /><br /><blockquote>Matthew 26:26-28 And while they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, "Take, eat; this is My body." And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, "Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins. </blockquote><blockquote>Mark 14:22-24 And while they were eating, He took some bread, and after a blessing He broke it; and gave it to them, and said, "Take it; this is My body." And when He had taken a cup, and given thanks, He gave it to them; and they all drank from it. And He said to them, "This is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. </blockquote><blockquote>Luke 22:19-20 And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it, and gave it to them, saying, "This is My body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of Me." And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, "This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood.</blockquote><br />Here we have no less than a threefold (four if you include 1 Cor 11) repetition of what Jesus said about the emblems of bread and wine in Scripture. Unlike most parts of the Bible, this isn’t mentioned once and we move on. It is repeated three times in the Gospels, and once more in an Epistle. That’s a high level of repetition for the Bible, it suggests it is important.<br /><br />So let’s revisit the arguments we opened with. What more would Jesus have to do to indicate that we are meant to take his words here in a strict literal sense? After all, it’s a strict, literal <em>command</em>—take and eat this physical bread and drink this physical wine. So why do you not take the description of the bread and wine in a strict literal sense?—that it is the actual body and blood of Jesus. It’s a short statement, there’s nothing in the text to even remotely suggest that it isn’t literal. Command, and statement about the emblem. That’s it. So why don’t you take the description of the emblem strictly literally? You interpret the command <i>literally</i>, but the reason for the command as some kind of <i>metaphor</i>.<br /><br />And you can see the same kind of argument get raised as I summarised at the start for the Creation Scientist. What could be more central to Christianity than Word and Sacrament? If you are going to explain away the sacrament, which stands at the heart of Christianity, then what does it matter if you take any other part of Scripture literally? If you can’t trust the word of God <em>here</em>, in the face of contemporary wisdom that physical bread and wine can’t ‘become Jesus’ and still remain bread and wine to all empirical experimentation, then you’ve already surrendered to the world.<br /><br />The sacramentalist—Lutheran, Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Anglo-Catholic, can look you in the eye knowing that <em>they</em> take these words of Jesus in a strict literal sense, and don’t try and explain them away, and they have a <em>lot</em> of Church tradition on their side. The bread is Jesus’ body. The wine is Jesus’ blood. Jesus himself says it. A realist view of the sacrament is the overwhelming position of church tradition.<br /><br />The general response is to argue that the words are to be taken poetically, that they are a metaphor. Bread and wine <em>symbolises</em> Jesus’ body and blood.<br /><br />Support is generally enlisted from Paul’s version of the words in 1 Cor 11:<br /><blockquote>1 Corinthians 11:23-26 For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He broke it, and said, "This is My body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of Me." In the same way He took the cup also, after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes.</blockquote><br />Here, it is argued, we are told that we to ‘do this in remembrance of me’. If it is a ‘remembrance feast’ then it is a symbolic identity between emblem and Jesus’ body and blood. But this argument hardly proves that Jesus’ words must <em>not</em> be taken literally. It’s a literal command—do this in remembrance of me. So why read the other bit non-literally—this is my body? And why does doing it in remembrance of Jesus automatically mean it isn’t strictly his body and blood? Surely I remember Jesus <em>more</em> if what I consume really is part of him than if I just eat bread and wine?<br /><br />Other support for a metaphorical reading come from Jesus’ words in John’s Gospel where there are a number of statements like:<br /><br /><blockquote><p>John 6:48 I am the bread of life. </p><p>John 10:7 I am the door of the sheep.</p><p>John 15:5 I am the vine, you are the branches;</p></blockquote>Here are examples where Jesus uses metaphors—saying that he is something, when it is clear that the ‘is’ is not meant to be taken literally. Jesus is <em>not</em> a physical door to physical sheep. So, it is argued, when Jesus says the bread is his body, the ‘is’ shouldn’t be taken literally. It is a metaphor.<br /><br />This argument is weaker than the argument from 1 Cor 11 <em>if</em> you hold to the principle that the Bible should be taken literally except where it can’t.<br /><br />It’s one thing to say:<br /><br /><blockquote>I am the vine</blockquote>That can be fairly easily seen to be a metaphor. Whether you say ‘I am <em>the</em> vine’ or ‘My love is <em>a</em> red rose’ the kind of principles of metaphors are fairly clearly kept.<br /><br />But when Jesus says, ‘this bread is my body’ it doesn’t fit all that obviously into the principles of a metaphor. ‘this bread is a body’, ‘this bread is the body’—those are fairly clearly candidates for a metaphor. But ‘this bread is <em>my</em> body’ really strains the principles of metaphors. If I said, ‘My love is this rose bush’ at least half of my hearers, I’d suggest, would take me to mean that I devote myself to the rose bush I’d singled out, rather than thinking I was treating that particular rose bush as a metaphorical symbol of a human female for whom I had affection. And if I said “This rose bush is my love” I’d suggest the proportion of hearers would climb even higher.<br /><br />In other words, there’s <em>no</em> clinching <em>textual</em> argument to show that the words of institution <em>must</em> be taken metaphorically. So, if the Bible should be taken literally as the basic way of reading it, shouldn’t we take the words of institution literally?<br /><br />What I think this shows is that reading the Bible is not a matter of just taking things literally unless that’s ‘obviously’ wrong and only then accepting a non-literal reading. The Bible doesn’t work according to those rules. And so it’ll be to the issue of rules for controlling the reading of the Bible that we turn to next.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-5187103097640951772007-12-03T12:03:00.000-08:002007-12-10T00:27:43.976-08:00An Award Winning Cultic BlogThis was going to wait until after Part VII, but noses are already out of joint, so I've opted to move it forward a bit.<br /><br />The blog <em>Sydney Anglican Heretics</em> has apparently given this blog an award, 'the Baddeley Award', and has even named it after me (one presumes - I mean it could be after my cousin, who is a lot more famous, but that's probably unlikely). The award is for putting some effort into my posts where I indicate my problems with Creation Science (although it is looking like "Creationism" might be a term that that blog at least finds less problematic).<br /><br />I'm a bit bemused to be the recipient of the inaugural award. I can't quite imagine Calvin giving Servetus an award for putting some effort into his heresy. Athanasius giving Arius an 'Arius' award for being the 'most improved' heretic also doesn't quite sit right.<br /><br />Nonetheless, it looks like they're hoping to undertake some kind of response to what I've posted. I'm a firm believer that, by and large, one needs to hear two sides of an argument to draw even provisional conclusions, so, given that the name of the blog has already appeared in the comments (and that SAH even became aware of this blog, which I didn't think would happen), I was going to link the blog at the end of Part VII so people could have a read of the critiques as they are produced. It was with some misgiving, as I don't think this group is likely to do a particularly good job of it, which people might take as evidence that the arguments I've put forward are stronger than they might actually be. Nonetheless, some critique is better than none. So the name is now in the blog proper, not just the comments.<br /><br />I would wait a while before going over to read it at this stage. At the moment the only response has been a post by "Neil Moore" trying to accuse me of being cultic. The reasons are:<br /><ul><li>I control who can post on the blog (I won't allow SAH to post inflammatory comments here under a cloak of anonymity).</li><br /><li>I selectively use Scripture, 'to the exclusion of that which undermines his point'.</li><br /><li>I'm motivated by an overweening desire to defend the Diocese and Peter Jensen.</li></ul><br /><br />The only argument offered to support these accusations is a story about one Mark Kay's ability to reduce a woman university student to tears by his manner in criticising the current Archbishop of Sydney. It's classic <em>ad hominem</em>, and probably deserves an award of its own, as there's probably a difficulty rating in not just playing the man rather than the ball, but in trying to play the man by playing a completely disconnected woman.<br /><br />It certainly is the case that I hold the Diocese and its leaders in esteem, including both the Jensens senior, and also others who are sometimes seen as their opposition within the Diocese. I'm not ashamed of that and, given the Bible's injunctions to hold leaders in honour, it's a bit disappointing that this is being seen as a <em>defect</em>. It's probably a sad reflection on church life generally, that such a feature would be considered cultic. Some of us find we can respect people and institutions deeply and yet feel free to dissent at points. It's sad to think that kind of freedom might not be open to others.<br /><br />I would also suggest that writing some exploratory posts on an obscure and brand new blog is a strange way to try and defend the Diocese from the attacks of SAH. I don't think the Diocese needs defending anyway. SAH is, as I've said before, a bad reflection on creationism, and anonymous accusations don't warrant a defence. The posts are what I've said they are - a series of reflections that crystalised after an unfortunate experience on SAH. They aren't even particularly about SAH.<br /><br />Hopefully there'll be something about the <em>arguments</em> I put forward in the future. But for the moment it seems I have graduated from heretic to award winning cultist. Bet the rest of you mere heretics out there are jealous. If SAH produces something significant I might take the time to interact with it here. But I think I'm only obligated to engage with their first post. It's just a shame that they began this way.<br /><br /><em>Edited: After much further reflection and prayer, and a number of communications from people who had visited the blog in question I have removed the link to the blog that was here originally. I originally ended my conversation with them (as I informed them) because I judged them to be the kind of people Paul describes (or people who would tolerate such people in the interests of having a coalition against us):<blockquote>Titus 3:9-11 But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and strife and disputes about the Law, for they are unprofitable and worthless. Reject a factious man after a first and second warning, knowing that such a man is perverted and is sinning, being self-condemned.</blockquote><blockquote>1 Timothy 6:3-5 If anyone advocates a different doctrine and does not agree with sound words, those of our Lord Jesus Christ, and with the doctrine conforming to godliness, he is conceited and understands nothing; but he has a morbid interest in controversial questions and disputes about words, out of which arise envy, strife, abusive language, evil suspicions, and constant friction between men of depraved mind and deprived of the truth, who suppose that godliness is a means of gain.</blockquote><br />Of the comments I've received publicly and privately, <strong>every one</strong>, (even, in one case, someone who is a creationist) has made the same judgement of the people on that blog and their actions. It is not their ideas, but the rampant ungodliness of their actions that has caused complaint. In such a case, it is not simply a matter of openly comparing ideas. So I've removed the link, it's easy enough to find the blog if you really need to read them. It's a symbolic action to indicate my rejection of their claims to be serving Christ in their manner of operating. I'll again discharge my responsibility by saying: I recommend against visiting the blog, if all that's motivating you is idle curioristy. And do not comment on the blog, it just tempts them to more ungodliness.</em>Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-71301858519566516962007-11-30T19:15:00.000-08:002007-11-30T12:38:44.760-08:00Problems With Creation Science V: A God Who Uses Death In A Good Creation? Part II<em>A quick note to say that this is part 2 of a two-parter that were posted together. Please go to the previous post to pick up where this argument starts.</em><br /><br />In light of the previous post, I would want to argue that it is not at all obvious that animal death is inconsistent with creation being good. Calling something ‘good’ reflects two things about the thing, its nature and its purpose. It’s not good for the man to be alone. That tells you something about the man—what he is, and what he is intended for. The fact that this can only be solved by creating someone made out of his very bone and flesh tells you even more about him and the woman—what they are, and what they are for.<br /><br />But is it ‘not good’ for a rock to be alone? Or a tree? How about a cloud? Or a star? How about a bolt of lightning? How about a mathematical equation?<br /><br />‘Good’ is not a ‘one size fits all’ category. What is good is going to be different as we move from one thing to the next. It is good for human sex to occur in the context of marriage. But animals don’t get married—is that ‘not good’? Some species mate with more than just one partner in the one mating season, others change partners from one season to the next, still others mate for life. Are we supposed to think that all the reproductive patterns except the last one are due to the Fall, and if it wasn’t for sin, all species of animals would be monogamous? (And that would still fall short of God's Law, which requires marriage and not just monogamy.) Or, is it that God’s commands are intended for <em>human beings</em> and are good for humans, and have nothing to say to animals, for whom good will be different according to their nature and purpose? Some will reproduce asexually, some monogamously, some with other mating patterns.<br /><br />And if that is even partially accepted, why stop at death and draw the line there? If it is ok for plants to die in the absence of sin, why think it’s an assault on the goodness of creation if animals do? As I’ve already argued in post IV, I think there is good reason in the Bible to think that animals’ nature and purpose is different from humanity’s at this point. Animals weren’t made to live forever, and don’t have the kind of nature that fits with immortality (they aren’t in the image of God, and they cannot be united to Christ by faith). I suggest that animals dying isn’t any problem for the goodness of creation—unless you anthropomorphise them.<br /><br />However, I think it is fair to say that arguments against the incompatibility of animal <em>death</em> are <em>really</em> arguments against animal <em>suffering</em> (as the person who offered the needle sticking experiment showed—an argument about death was immediately moved to an argument about pain). After all, we live in an age where voluntary euthanasia is taken seriously as many of us instinctively feel that people should have the right to escape suffering. Pain, rather than death, is the ultimate evil for us.<br /><br />I don’t think there is a knock-down answer at this point, because, no matter where you stand on these issues, there are minimal biblical statements on the issue. The following issues would seem to be pertinent however, and I’ll list them in no particular order. <ol><li>It is possible that while death is natural, suffering only began with the Fall. That is, being eaten alive would have been a painless experience for animals before the Fall and now isn’t. This is pure speculation, so I’m against it on principle, but it can hardly be said to be <em>more</em> speculative than the idea that when the Fall occurred God changed a fair chunk of the animate world and turned them into carnivores (God mentioned the appearance of thorns and thistles in Genesis 3:18 but neglected to mention that you might want to rethink playing with the nice big yellow pussy cat with the large mane any more...), and transformed the entire ecology to cope with the new situation. So if you’re a Creation Scientist, which seems to involve a fair bit of speculating to make the selective literal readings work, you’re hardly any worse off.<br /><br />At this point, I suspect someone is going to raise Genesis 1:29-30<br /><blockquote>Genesis 1:29-30 Then God said, "Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food"; and it was so.</blockquote>Here, it is surely fairly clear that there are no carnivores at the point of creation. Only plants are given for food. And this is for both humans <em>and</em> animals.<br /><br />The problem with taking this that strictly is when one looks at when this command is broadened and meat is also put on the dining table:<br /><blockquote>Genesis 9:3 "Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give all to you, as I gave the green plant. </blockquote>Two things need to be noticed here. First, this is not a result of the <em>Fall</em>. It is what happens in the wake of the <em>Flood</em>. So there's still no direct connection to Adam's sin. You need to hold that there were no carnivores until after the Flood. This means that, according to a strict literal reading, Adam's sin was many centuries in the past when the entire ecology changed, and a large number of species were fundamentally transformed. Even more, the change happened <em>after</em> the Flood, in the context of God blessing the human race and establishing how to live again now that judgement has passed. All of which makes it hard to relate carnviores as some kind of automatic effect of sin, and not a creative work of God.<br />Second, the passage <em>doesn't</em> say that animals are allowed to eat other animals now. <em>Humans</em> are, but animals are not given permission. If you are going to take 1:29-30 in a strictly literal sense and argue that all animals ate plants and only plants, then you need to take 9:3 strictly literally and say that animals were not given permission to broaden their diet from plants. Hence, there should be <em>no</em> carnivorous animals. Because the stricture of 1:29-30 is never lifted for animals (and thorns growing does not mean carnivores appearing, <em>especially</em> if you think the big divide is between plant life and animate life...).<br /><br />So, if you are into a strict literal reading of these chapters <em>and</em> you hold that there <em>are</em> animals who eat other animals, you do so in the face of what the Bible clearly teaches in Genesis on the basis of that strict literal approach. Namely, that all animals eat plants and only humans are given permission to eat animals. What you think you know about the world (that some animals do eat other animals) and what other parts of the Bible seem to say (that some animals, like the hawk, are carnivores) contradicts Genesis 1-8 on your strictly literal approach.<br /></li><br /><li>It would seem that suffering is one of those things that will not exist in the new creation: <blockquote>Revelation 21:4 …and He shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there shall no longer be any death; there shall no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.</blockquote>Here suffering is linked with things that are clearly the result of sin in the world: death, mourning, and crying. This would seem to fairly clearly indicate that suffering too is a consequence of sin. There are two possible mitigators for this, however. The first is that as you move from verse 4 to the broader context of Revelation 21 and 22, not all the changes that take place are due to the absence of sin—it’s hard to say, for example, that there being no sun or moon is because the sun and moon only existed due to sin. So it is possible (although I agree it is highly unlikely) that ‘suffering’ is the odd one out in this set in verse 4, the only member that is not due to sin. The other possible mitigator is that, as always, Revelation is human-centric. It doesn’t really care all that much about the animal world. It explains the new creation in terms of its ‘cash value’ for <em>human beings</em>. So you have to make a jump from this verse to animals to decide that it shows that it is not good for there to be a creation in which animals suffer. Nonetheless, I think this does give <em>some</em> support to the idea that suffering isn’t good.</li><br /><li>However, I still want to claim that our obsession with pain is wrongheaded. We elevate it way too high in the ‘evils’ that exist in our world (and I say that as someone who has an embarrassingly low pain threshold). When Romans 8 looks at the ‘good’ for God’s people, suffering is actually an instrument in accomplishing the good: <blockquote>Romans 8:28-30 And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren; and whom He predestined, these He also called; and whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.</blockquote><blockquote>Romans 8:35-37 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written, "For Thy sake we are being put to death all day long; We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered." But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us.</blockquote>Here in Romans 8, the good that all things work together for is to be conformed to the image of God’s Son. It is not to avoid pain or suffering. ‘Good’ is to be conformed to Christ’s image. Suffering, or the lack of it, is quite irrelevant to that definition. In fact, as the later material in 8:35-37 indicates, suffering in its various forms can actually be the things in which we overwhelmingly conquer. Far from being opposed to the good, they are used by God to bring about the good. In the world we find ourselves, even pain serves God’s purposes to bring about good. And if that is the case, its presence may not cut against the goodness of creation. If it serves the purposes of blessing it is an ally of good, even if we’d rather not experience it. Pain is not the great evil we make it out to be, even though it is part of the glory of the new creation that there will be no suffering. It’s part of the parochial patheticness of our day and age that our existence is getting increasingly defined by the attempt to avoid deprivation at all costs (with the resulting cost that that has for those around us). On the criteria of Romans 8, animal suffering is compatible with good (even if it is not quite good itself) if there is some way in which it serves the purpose of creation—to conform us to the image of God’s Son.</li></ol>Behind this last point is Luther’s Theology of the Cross. This is something that I was introduced to by Mark Thompson when he taught my year the Reformation and that, as the students to whom I’ve taught the Reformation can attest, has had an ongoing provocative effect on me. It has lodged away and I keep returning to it and wrestling with it. The term ‘theology of the cross’ is a phrase that people have lifted from Luther’s <em>Heidelberg Disputation</em>, the key points of which (for our purposes now) are:<br /><blockquote>19. That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened [Rom. 1.20].<br />20. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.<br />21. A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.</blockquote>They were points for a disputation and, as the connected ‘proofs’ showed, drew heavily on 1 Cor 1-4 for the ideas embodied in these brief, allusive statements. In it Luther is comparing two basic paths to knowing God.<br /><br />The first is described in point 19, it is a ‘theology of glory’. In it, the theologian holds that when we look at things around us we can clearly see God. This is often described as natural theology and was intended by Luther to include mysticism as much as rational attempts to reason to God’s existence and character from looking at the world around us. If one reads the rest of the Disputation, it becomes clear that Luther sees this approach to knowing God as tied to a self-righteous pursuit of achieving one’s own righteousness by works. However, the focus of points 19-21 is on the two paths to knowing God. And the theology of glory tries to go straight to God’s eternal glory by reading it off the glory of creation. Because we can see that this thing in creation is good, or strong, or whatever, we can deduce God’s goodness or strength or whatever as a larger version of it.<br /><br />The opposing way is radically different. Here the theologian looks only at the cross for the knowledge of God. And when he or she looks at the cross he or she sees God through suffering and death. God’s glory and strength shines forth in that which a theology of glory finds scandalous. We come to know the righteous God of life by looking to the cross where Jesus dies under the judgement on sin. In the cross God comes to us as the opposite of what we would expect from him. And, Luther indicates, a theology of the cross sees this as the paradigm for understanding God and his ways. God’s work will always be a scandal to sinners. It will always offend our notions of love, righteousness, glory, justice and the like.<br /><br />The point from this is that Creation Science is a natural theology <em>par excellence</em>. (In fact, the complaint of one of the guys I spoke to was that, by not accepting Creation Science, ‘the Sydney Diocese’ prevented people from being able to reason their way to God by looking at the world around them, He complained that we were stopping almost the very thing that Luther is attacking! It was one of those bizarre moments when, as Luther says, the theologian of glory calls good evil.) Creation Science tries to move to God’s glory by reading it off those things that <em>we</em> find glorious, and explain away those things that offend our notions of good and the like (like suffering).<br /><br />But the cross opposes such methods every bit as much as it opposes attempts to erect one’s own righteousness. The cross is <em>the</em> revelation of God. And it is a scandal. Because in the cross God is associated with everything that we consider unfitting of him. His glory is revealed in the suffering of his beloved Son.<br /><br />In other words, don’t assume that our notions of ‘good’ can be trusted, and don’t need to be overturned. For if you do, you are radically underestimating just how enslaved to sin you really are. By nature you call evil good and good evil, even as you do something really evil (justify yourself before God) rather than something truly righteous (throw yourself on God’s mercy). Only the cross teaches you to approach God differently than what comes naturally. And only the cross (and not nature) gives you the knowledge of God.<br /><br />We need to learn from God what good means. And it may be the opposite of what we take for granted. After all, the cross was.<em></em><em></em>Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-35276265527788132972007-11-30T19:05:00.000-08:002007-11-30T11:05:00.983-08:00Problems With Creation Science V: A God Who Uses Death In A Good Creation? Part IThis then raises the next stage of the theological argument. “How could God have made a ‘good’ creation if animals died?”<br /><br />Behind this argument is the view that I think is fairly common among Creation Scientists. On this view, God made every creature a herbivore, and (presumably) without the equipment to kill other creatures, and without the biochemistry to be sustained by a diet of meat, and without the complex and synergistic ecology that the world now enjoys that <em>depends</em> upon some species eating other species for everything to work properly. Death, and the associated pain of being killed violently, on this view, is fairly obviously ‘not good’, so how could creation be ‘good’ if the death of animals is not due to sin? And, in the discussion, there were some fairly heated words said over the issue: I was asked to go a stick a long needle in an animal to see how it reacted to see if that was ‘good’, and the kind of God involved was described as a ‘monster’.<br /><br />There are however, I think, serious problems with such arguments. We’ll start with the most emotive and easily dismissed one, and move out to some of the others.<br /><br />The suggestion to stick a long needle in an animal to see how it reacts, betrays a very poor grasp of the difference between God and us. Unless you are a radical Open Theist (a view that God not only is not in control of what happens in the world as per classical arminianism, but doesn’t even know for sure what will happen in the future—and so all sin and suffering is really a consequence of God guessing wrong, rather than him standing by and allowing it to occur on his watch) then every animal that is poked with a long needle is poked with God’s full knowledge and acquiescence. God, even for the arminian, stands by and lets it happen. If a human stands by and allows an animal to be tortured when they could prevent it we would consider that to be culpable (and it might even be illegal). But can such criteria really be applied to God?<br /><br />Everyone who dies, dies at God’s command in <em>some</em> sense, because God sets the limits of our life—when we will be born, and when we will die. But only a fool (and I use that word deliberately in its biblical sense) would suggest that somehow God is a murderer, or culpable for humans dying. God is not a human being. He gives life and takes it away. That is what it means for him to be God. Aslan is not a tame lion.<br /><br />If God can rule over a world in which suffering and death exist and be good (and most Christians would argue against atheists that he can) then it is not immediately obvious that God couldn’t make a world in which suffering and death exist and still be good. After all, unless you are an Open Theist, you accept that God made the world knowing that that is what actually happened. In other words the ‘torture animals’ argument betrays a ridiculously poor grasp of the difference between God and us. You can <em>argue</em> that it is not good for God to do that, you can’t just <em>presume</em> that what is not good for you to do is not good for God to do. Because <em>you don’t sit on the throne of Heaven</em>.<br /><br />The next point is for me the most decisive. I think it is fairly clear that God takes credit for carnivores and other aspects of the animate world that we tend to consider ‘not good’. The key passage for this is Job 39-41.<br /><br />The book of Job has been set in motion by a scandal—righteous Job experiences monstrous suffering. As is commonly known, most of the book is taken up with a ‘debate’ between Job and his three friends. The three friends are concerned to justify God in the face of Job’s suffering and so blame it, in different ways, upon some heinous sin in Job’s life. Job (like the reader) knows that’s not right, and, with increasing vigour protests his innocence and demands some kind of vindication, all the time getting bolder and bolder in the way his statements imply some kind of problem with how God has treated him.<br /><br />God finally appears and speaks to the debate. The problem could have been settled easily by explaining the nature of suffering in a world in which sin exists, or even by explaining that it was really due to Satan’s agency (after all, we the reader get that information so it’s hardly a state secret). But God does no such thing. He parades before Job item after item that shows that Job is not in a position to interrogate God in this way. Job can’t do any of the things that God does all the time in managing his creation. Job has neither the wisdom, nor the power, to be God. So on what basis does he think he should be a backseat driver about any part of God’s management of affairs? It is a powerful statement of the profound limitations on our knowledge of God. And I think Christians should pay far more attention to it than they do. It would reduce the number of flippant ‘that kind of God would be a monster’ type of arguments that seem irreverently frequent these days, among other things. (Have people not read what happened to Job’s friends?)<br /><br />In this context we find the following three examples that God puts before Job. The first is the ostrich:<blockquote>Job 39:13-18 "The ostriches' wings flap joyously With the pinion and plumage of love, For she abandons her eggs to the earth, And warms them in the dust, And she forgets that a foot may crush them, Or that a wild beast may trample them. "She treats her young cruelly, as if they were not hers; Though her labor be in vain, she is unconcerned; Because God has made her forget wisdom, And has not given her a share of understanding. "When she lifts herself on high, She laughs at the horse and his rider.</blockquote>God’s point is that the ostrich is a fast, stupid bird. It is so stupid that it ‘treats its young cruelly’, leaving its egg in the sand and moving on. And the reason given is <em>not</em> that this is a Fallen world—that would defeat the entire point of God’s response to Job in these chapters! (Something that the guys I was debating with could not or would not recognise. They opted for a reading—that all these examples I'm about to list were due to sin—that overturned the message <em>of the entire book of Job</em> rather than take the plain meaning of the passage. And they did so with no evidence in the text to support it.) The ostrich lacks wisdom ‘because God has made her forget wisdom’—and this in a context where God is speaking of his wisdom and power, and not the conditions of sin. The ostrich is dumb because that’s how God made it. As a consequence, its young aren’t looked after.<br /><br />It is similar with the hawk:<blockquote>Job 39:26-30 "Is it by your understanding that the hawk soars, Stretching his wings toward the south? "Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up, And makes his nest on high? "On the cliff he dwells and lodges, Upon the rocky crag, an inaccessible place. "From there he spies out food; His eyes see it from afar. "His young ones also suck up blood; And where the slain are, there is he."</blockquote>This one is particularly pertinent because it comes immediately before the first of Job’s two repentances in these chapters. It is the clinching argument of the first section. And here the hawk is spoken of in unambiguous terms as a carnivore whose ‘young ones also suck up blood’. There is no squeamishness about its carnivore nature. The hawk’s search for prey is directly linked to God’s understanding and God’s command, and the hawk is unambiguously linked with death (where the slain are, there is he). And there isn’t even the hint that these carnivore features that God highlights are due to sin. Quite the opposite, they are held up as manifestations of God’s wisdom and power. Otherwise, why would Job repent of asking for an explanation, rather than say, "thanks, now I have an answer"?<br /><br />Finally, there is good old Leviathan in chapter 41, who, along with Behometh in chapter 40, is a favourite of creation scientists wanting to prove that dinosaurs were alive concurrently with the humans of Job’s time. In the long description of Leviathan we find the following:<blockquote>Job 41:8-10 "Lay your hand on him; Remember the battle; you will not do it again! "Behold, your expectation is false; Will you be laid low even at the sight of him? "No one is so fierce that he dares to arouse him; Who then is he that can stand before Me?</blockquote>What is being held up here is the inherently violent nature of Leviathan. Just putting one’s hand on him leads to a battle of fearsome proportions. In fact, ‘no one is so fierce that he dares to arouse him.’ And God draws the implication, ‘who then is he that can stand before <em>me</em>?’<br /><br />If Leviathan’s violent nature is the result of the Fall (for which there is no evidence in the text), this argument doesn’t <em>completely</em> fail, but it does become weird. It’d be analogous to God saying “Look at how destructively powerful the devil is. You can’t stand up against him, so you can’t beat me either.” It’s not impossible for God to argue that way, but it would seem to be incongruous in light of God’s normal stance towards evil. God doesn’t normally compare himself as like to like with evil. He normally sets himself over against it as a binary opposite.<br /><br />No, the spirit of the passage suggests that Leviathan’s destructive power is to be connected to God’s power, not to the Fall.<br /><br />Hence, what we have in Job are a number of indications that foolish animals, carnivores, and awesomely violent animals are an expression of God’s wisdom and power.<br /><br />In light of this, I would be cautious about attributing the power of the lion, or the shark, or the hawk as they pursue and kill their prey to the Fall. The only thing we have from the Bible that speaks to this at all links it to God’s unfathomable wisdom and irresistible power. And it does so to remind us that we are not qualified to judge God on how he has managed his creation. That suggests that such features of the world are good, but the kind of good that is not domesticated to us. They are the good works of the God whose ways are unfathomable and whose judgements are beyond finding out.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-40489072463706504712007-11-28T01:37:00.000-08:002007-11-28T01:45:02.789-08:00Problems With Creation Science IV Supplemental: A Naturally Unnatural DeathMartin and Bruce have raised a good question about the naturalness of human death that wasn’t covered in Post IV. Probably foolishly, I thought it was an implication from my earlier post on Human, All Too Human, and so passed over it. No doubt it was only ever present in my own mind, so I’ll take a few words to try and spell it out a bit.<br /><br />Bruce’s question is a good place to start:<blockquote>I often hear from the pulpit, or in pious Christian talk, reflections on the sheer unnaturalness of [human] death. In a sense one knows what this means: it is contrary to our individual value and --- how shall one put this? --- spiritual nature. It is offensive. And yet ... as animals, we die: we are mortal. This is uncanny, and recognised as such even by quite secular figures, but it is obviously unnnatural only in a certain sense.<br /></blockquote><br />Bruce is putting his finger on the fact that death seems to fit in very well with the universe as we know it. It is not as though human beings run along from strength to strength and then, out of the blue death appears and takes them away. There’s no <em>mystery</em> to death, in the sense that its causes can’t be discovered. We can see the natural processes that led to death occurring, and all of them seem ‘natural’, well fitted to life in this world. More than that, we struggle to imagine what would be involved in such processes <em>not</em> existing or <em>not</em> leading to death.<br /><br />This appears to be part of the context into which the second half of 1 Cor 15 is written. <br /><br />From 1 Cor 15:1-34 Paul appears to be addressing a claim by some of the Corinthians that there is no resurrection of the dead. Paul deals with the issue by showing how Christ’s resurrection is a constitutive element of the gospel and is the basis of our resurrection. He then in verses 23 to 28 deals with the fact that Christ has already been resurrected but we have to wait for ours as a ‘group lot’ and shows how this order in resurrection links to bigger programme that God has going, of putting all of Christ’s enemies under his feet, with the final result that God will be all in all. He then brings out some implications.<br /><br />Then in verse 35 Paul addresses a related issue:<br /><br /><blockquote>1 Corinthians 15:35 But someone will say, "How are the dead raised? And with what kind of body do they come?"</blockquote>As becomes apparent in the ensuing verses, this is a challenge to the hope of a resurrection. From the way that Paul deals with the question, it appears that the question is getting at the naturalness of death for bodies as we know them and the incongruity of suggesting that a physical body could last for ever.<br /><br />This is particularly clear in the following material from 1 Cor 15, where Paul unfolds the answer:<blockquote>1 Corinthians 15:42-55 So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown a perishable body, it is raised an imperishable body; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So also it is written, "The first MAN, Adam, BECAME A LIVING SOUL." The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural; then the spiritual. The first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven. As is the earthy, so also are those who are earthy; and as is the heavenly, so also are those who are heavenly. Just as we have borne the image of the earthy, we will also bear the image of the heavenly.<br /><br />Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality. But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written, "DEATH IS SWALLOWED UP in victory. "O DEATH, WHERE IS YOUR VICTORY? O DEATH, WHERE IS YOUR STING?"</blockquote>Paul’s argument here is predicated on a strong difference between Adam and Christ. Indeed, they are held up as contrasts. Adam’s body (and our bodies) are perishable, dishonoured, weak, and natural. The resurrection body of Christ (that we will also be given) is imperishable, glorious, powerful and spiritual. <br /><br />More than that, Adam and Christ, not ‘just’ their bodies, are contrasted. Adam is earthy—he was made out of the earth and of the earth. He is made of the stuff of this world, and so is well suited to life here. Accordingly, in creation he became a living soul (alluding back to Gen 2:7—the breath, or spirit of God entered into Adam and he became a living soul). But Christ is radically different. He is heavenly—his source is heaven, the right hand of God from which he came and to which he returned. He is no mere soul in whom life has been infused from without. He is himself the Lord of Life, he is a life-giving spirit—a source of life for others. (Incidentally, this part of Scripture is hard to reconcile with any idea of a bipartite or tripartite understanding of humanity as body, soul, spirit: Adam and Christ are soul/spirit, not have a soul/spirit). <br /><br />And Paul concludes that phase of his argument by indicating that just as we have worn Adam’s image, we will in the resurrection bear the image of Christ. This suggests that ‘image’ is here being used in an ontological sense—Paul has in view a fundamental change in human nature that is going to occur.<br /><br />The key bit is the implications of this in the final paragraph. Resurrection of the body is not more of the same. It involves a change. Perishable bodies will become imperishable. Mortal bodies will become immortal. And Paul makes it very clear with his statement that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.’ The New Heavens and New Earth will be so radically different, that a different kind of humanity (a different image) will be needed for us to inhabit that realm. It’s not just what we have now without end, it’s a different kind of existence. It is radically better and more glorious.<br /><br />It is, I suggest, gloriously head-spinning stuff, and far beyond us to grasp in anything other than through a mirror darkly. <br /><br />What is important for our discussion however, is the way in which Paul here seems happy to intermingle conditions arising from sin and conditions arising from creation without any attempt to distinguish them. Adam is earthy, he is from the earth, and is living soul. Accordingly his body is natural, and so is mortal, perishable, weak, and ends in dishonour. Paul is very clear that death is the final enemy, and is the result of sin—he returns to this theme in the next verse after what I’ve just quoted above. And yet, the way he talks about Adam in contrast to Christ in these verses makes the difference seem primarily to do with creation versus new creation. After all, he is focusing on Adam’s natural body, the fact that Adam is from the earth and so is earthy, and the nature of Adam in Gen 2:7. Nothing about what he says here about Adam seems drawn from chapter three.<br /><br />That is, the basic picture in 1 Cor 15 seems to be both that death is a tyrant, and Christ’s final enemy and that Adam and his image-sharers (us) are by nature mortal and perishable and that we need to be fundamentally changed to be made immortal.<br /><br />How is this to be understood? I’ll highlight three ways I think Christians have often sought to understand this. This isn’t an exhaustive list, and there are variations of how these views could be expressed, and they can be combined in different ways, but it’ll give some pegs for thinking:<br /><br />First, Adam was immortal but lost it through sinning. In the beginning Adam had life in himself, but when he sinned there was a basic change to the fabric of his nature and he became mortal. I think this view is probably the most common position among popular Evangelicalism. I also think it is the hardest to square with the tree of life in the Garden, as the tree of life suggests that Adam and Eve needed a source external to themselves for their life to be continued. Immortals don’t need a tree of life.<br /><br />Second, Adam was mortal but would become immortal if he passed a period of testing by not eating the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Here Adam is not inherently immortal, but there was an implicit offer of being translated to the kind of condition Paul is speaking of in 1 Cor 15 without sin and Christ’s death and resurrection as the means to get there. That could have all been bypassed. My impression is that this is the view of Calvin and others.<br /><br />Third, Adam was mortal by nature but immortal by participation. That is, left to ourselves, death is as natural to human beings as it is for all other parts of the animate creation. There is nothing inherently immortal about flesh and blood—which is why flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God but must be put off for us to put on imperishability and immortality. What Adam and Eve were given was a source of life external to themselves that enabled them to enjoy a share in God’s own eternal life and so be kept from death. This was mediated through the Tree of Life.<br /><br />On this view death is unnatural when at looked at from the point of view of God’s purpose in creating humanity. We were made to stay connected to God through trusting his word and obeying it and so stay in the realm of life by being caught up in something greater than ourselves. Yet death is natural when looked at from the point of view of humanity’s nature. Humanity was made mortal like all creatures and so once we were cut off from God, we faced death like every other animal. <br /><br /><br />It is the image of God that made the difference, and this worked dynamically, not statically. It related us to God through his Image, his only begotten Son and so we were partakers in Life. <br /><br />It’s probably clear that I strongly favour this last view, despite the fact that, as far as I can see, it is a minority position within Evangelicalism. That’s for two reasons.<br /><br />One, I think it fits with Scripture better, as I’ve tried to briefly indicate.<br /><br />Two, I think it is arguably the dominant position of the early church. It’s not the only position in the early church, my impression is that Tertullian, for example believes that human souls are inherently immortal. Nonetheless, the view I’ve tried to unpack briefly here is held by a number of respected and orthodox teachers in the early church. I’ll give some brief extracts from Athanasius as an example:<br /><blockquote>For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good. By nature, of course, man is mortal, since he was made from nothing, but he bears also the Likeness of Him Who is, and if he preserves that Likeness through constant contemplation, then his nature is deprived of its power and he remains incorrupt. <em>De Incarnatione</em> §4</blockquote><br />Here, I hope, it should be clear that the basic schema is fairly similar to what I’ve outlined. Humanity is by nature mortal ‘of course’ (!). This is because he is a creature, and so has been made from nothing (a common link among the early church fathers in my reading—that which has a beginning naturally has an end as well). Hence, returning to non-existence is natural for humanity. But because humanity bears the Likeness of the Son, that underlying nature ‘is deprived of its power’ and humanity ‘remains incorrupt’. I’ll give one more example to show this isn’t an exception:<br /><blockquote>For God is good—or rather, of all goodness He is Fountainhead, and it is impossible for one who is good to be mean or grudging about anything. Grudging existence to none therefore, He made all things out of nothing through His own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ; and of all these His earthly creatures He reserved especial mercy for the race of men. Upon them, therefore, upon men who, as animals, were essentially impermanent, He bestowed a grace which other creatures lacked—namely, the impress of His own Image, a share in the reasonable being of the very Word Himself, so that, reflecting Him and themselves becoming reasonable and expressing the Mind of God even as He does, though in a limited degree, they might continue for ever in the blessed and only true life of the saints in paradise. <em>De Incarnatione</em> §3</blockquote><br />Here Athanasius indicates that men naturally die because we are fundamentally animals: ‘men who, as animals, were essentially impermanent.’ What makes us different from all other animals is a particular grace we have that nothing else has—we are made with an impress of God’s own Image, and share in the rationality of the Word of God. This is ‘so that, reflecting Him…they might continue for ever…in paradise.’ Here Athanasius is briefly stating my key points—human beings are animals and so are mortal. Our immortality came through our link to God forged by our sharing in the nature of the Word because we had the imprint of His Image within us.<br /><br />This is hardly unique to Athanasius, the idea that animals are mortal and human beings were able to transcend their natural mortality because of their being made in the Image of God is, as I’ve said, a common teaching in the early church. <br /><br />Athanasius’ comment about Paradise picks up an issue that Martin Kemp raised:<br /><br /><blockquote>Also Bill Dumbrell has written some interesting stuff (if I am remembering him correctly). He notes that Adam was made outside the garden, and then placed in the garden where there was the antidote to death in the the form of the tree. I think some interesting things follw from this observation:1. Sin existed outside the garden2. Adam was formed outside the garden in the realm of death (allowing for evolution)3. Inside the garden it's not that death didin't exist, it's just that there was an antidote.4. Adam and Eve's punishment was that they were barred from the antidote.</blockquote><br />I’ve already noted scepticism on my part about evolution, and I’d not see any need to see sin already existing before the events of chapter three. But I’d want to support the idea Marty is putting forward that there is something special about Eden.<br /><br />Creation Science, in my experience, seems to speak as though the Garden was what was happening for all of creation. That the conditions pictured in chapter 2 were the conditions throughout the world. And yet, Genesis 2 seems to suggest that there is something very different about life in the Garden and in the rest of the world (for example, there are no plants alive anywhere on the planet). Far from the Garden being the paradigm of pre-Fall creation, it seems in some ways to be something unique, a ‘paradise’. <br /><br />Long before we wrestled with these issues Athanasius seems to be sensitive to the issue of the status of Eden in relation to the rest of the world because in the material just after what I’ve quoted he contrasts ‘living in paradise’ with ‘dying outside it’. That is, he doesn’t just see the issue as ‘immortal people now die’. He sees the other aspect of the issue: people who were in paradise, and so could avoid death, have been removed from paradise and therefore die. In other words, death seems to be, in some sense ‘natural’ for life outside the Garden. The judgement is to be removed from the Garden, and so denied access to the Tree of Life, which is the antidote to (otherwise natural) death.<br /><br />When we look back at the original conditions of humanity, what do we think was happening then? Three kind of options: Immortal but had immortality taken away. Mortal but an offer of being changed into immortality if passed a test. Mortal, but rendered immortal through connection to God’s eternal life through the mediatorship of the Word.<br /><br />My argument in IV in many ways reflects that I hold to the third of these options as the one which best reflecting what Scripture says. All this is a long way of saying, I think that death is natural to humanity’s nature, but is unnatural in terms of God’s intention and purpose of humanity. We were made to live without end, and God set things up so that we would not go the way of all flesh despite the fact that that is natural for a creature. We were made with a nature that was mortal, but capable of immortality.<br /><br />In the New Heavens and the New Earth we will be by nature immortal, so nature and purpose will come together. But here too it will come ‘from without’—it will be because through his becoming man and then dying and rising to life that the eternal Son of God has united himself to creation and to humanity and is now the head over creation. Out of that relationship, forged through redemption, a whole new kind of existence is opened up to us in which death will be, not just unnatural in terms of God’s purposes, but an impossibility in the Kingdom of God.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-71865065199575727932007-11-22T12:15:00.000-08:002007-11-26T15:44:40.292-08:00Problems With Creation Science IV: When Death Isn’t DeathOne of the few theological arguments I have heard from Creation Scientists involves the issue of death.<br /><br />The first part of the argument goes like this (it’s my summary, not an actual quote):<br /><blockquote>“If we don’t accept an earth approximately 8 000 years old, then that would suggest that death existed before sin occurred. And the Bible says that death is the consequence of sin.”</blockquote>The argument picks up on the link that the NT makes between sin and death: <blockquote>Romans 5:12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned…</blockquote><blockquote>1 Corinthians 15:21-22 For since by a man came death, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.</blockquote><blockquote>1 Corinthians 15:56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law…</blockquote><blockquote>Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.</blockquote>That is, death is a consequence of sin—it is the wages of sin, or the just reward for evil. And so sin is the ‘sting’ that brings the poison of death. Sin is the cause of death.<br /><br />And in this schema, Adam has a pivotal position because his primordial sin brought death into creation, and all other death flows from his welcoming death in and giving it lordship over creation by his rebellion.<br /><br />If life existed before Adam, and presumably died (because, for example, dating of bones would be taken as more or less trustworthy) doesn’t this mean that the link between death and sin is broken?<br /><br />The question here, I would suggest, is what ‘death’ means in these passages. Does it mean death of anything living, or is it referring specifically to <em>human</em> death?<br /><br />Creation Scientists seem to assume that ‘death’ means ‘death of anything alive’. In fact, I would argue that the Bible has in mind <em>only</em> the death of humans when it talks of death being the judgement for sin.<br /><br />The starting point is to recognise that there is no explicit statement that non-human death is one of the consequences of Adam’s sin in the Bible. I’d like to show you some Scripture to that effect but I can’t. You can’t show something that isn’t there.<br /><br />What we <em>do</em> have is Romans 8: <blockquote>Romans 8:19-22 For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.</blockquote>Here there is a clear statement that creation was affected adversely by human sin, and that its redemption will be found when we receive ours—it will share in the ‘freedom of the glory’ that we will receive as God’s children. The key phrase would seem to be the statement of creation’s ‘slavery to corruption’. It’s an easy step to take this as alluding to non-human death, because death leads to the decomposition (corruption) of the body. But that’s too narrow. This part of Scripture is looking at creation <em>as a whole</em>. The <em>whole</em> of creation is in slavery to corruption—animals, and plants yes, but also rocks, water, wind, sun, moon and stars. Even more than that, such creaturely realities as light, sound, energy, even creaturely love and reason have to be included. <em>All</em> of it is under the slavery of corruption. So singling out animals dying as the meaning of the phrase seems a bit strange.<br /><br />This is the best one has when it comes to establishing that a link between Adam’s sin and non-humans dying exists. And it doesn’t establish that. Not by a long shot.<br /><br />In actual fact, the teaching of the Bible on the connection between sin and death suggests the <em>opposite</em>. The Bible is clear that sin and death are connected, that death is the <em>wages</em> for sin. Animals don’t sin. Sin is a distinctly human (and probably demonic) phenomena, something that only moral beings are capable of. So, the Bible’s teaching that death is God’s judgement on sin would seem to include <em>only</em> humans within it. Death in animals cannot be the wages of sin and that's the <em>only</em> link the Bible explicitly draws between Adamn's sin and death.<br /><br />There are four other lines of evidence that I would suggest indicate that ‘death’ refers <em>only</em> to human death.<br /><br />The first is that the tree of life in Genesis 2 and 3 seems fairly straightforwardly to be a tree intended for human beings <em>only</em>. That is, the gift of enduring life, seems to have been offered only to humans in the Garden, just as only humans are the focus of being driven out of the Garden and barred from the tree of life. So the gift of life without cessation seems to have only been intended for humans. Otherwise, you’d have to argue that the thrust of Genesis 2 & 3 is supposed to suggest that humanity needed the tree of life, but animals didn’t. This seems strange, to say the least. Why would animals contain life in themselves while humans don’t? Surely it is a more noble nature to contain life in oneself than to have to look to something else to sustain it? And if that’s the case, why do animals start dying once the tree of life is withheld? Immortal animals effectively ignores the tree of life.<br /><br />The second is that only humans are in the image of God. The seriousness of human death seems to be linked to the fact that human beings are unlike anything else in all creation. We alone are in God’s image, hence the seriousness of murder: <blockquote>Genesis 9:6 "Whoever sheds man's blood, By man his blood shall be shed, For in the image of God He made man.</blockquote>And even cursing: <blockquote>James 3:9 With it we bless our Lord and Father; and with it we curse men, who have been made in the likeness of God;</blockquote>It is fairly obvious, that such serious strictures are not placed around the death or cursing of animals. This suggests a unique sanctity of human life. This in turn would suggest a unique meaning to the <em>ending</em> of human life.<br /><br />The third line is that only humans are spoken of as receiving the Holy Spirit and of being united to Christ. Both of these are, in the NT, directly linked to eternal life, and are given only to humans, by faith. They aren’t for animals, and so there is no means to enter into eternal life held out to animals.<br /><br />Finally, only humans are offered the resurrection of the body. Only humans are actually given redemption from death. When I die, I die in the hope that death will one day release its hold on me and <em>I</em> will stand and see my Lord with <em>my</em> own eyes. No such hope is there for the goldfish or faithful Fido. Even if fish and dogs are in the New Earth, there is no promise that any dog that has existed will be resurrected.<br /><br />What God offers human beings is not offered to animals. It’s not just the continuation of a <em>species</em> but the life of the <em>individual</em> that is the Christian hope. And that is promised to humans <em>alone</em>.<br /><br />In other words, the general thrust of the Bible’s teaching about human beings and eternal life tends to draw a distinction between human life and non-human life. ‘Life’ and ‘death’ as blessing and judgement tends to be significant only for human beings, in the Bible’s spotlight. So death as a consequence of Adam's sin is most naturally read as <em>human</em> death being the result of <em>one human's</em> sin.<br /><br />Creation Scientists, in my experience, tend to obscure this distinction between human and non-human. They replace it with a distinction between plant life and animate life (human <em>and</em> animal). The reason for the distinction is argued to be the way the Bible speaks of the latter as having ‘the breath of the spirit of life.’ Plants don’t have this, and so, on this view, plant ‘death’ is not linked to sin (it’s not biblical ‘death’). <em>Both</em> animals and humans <em>do</em> have ‘the breath of the spirit of life’ and so, on this view, <em>both</em> ‘die’ in the Biblical sense, and hence as a consequence of Adam’s sin.<br /><br />I have already given the substance of my response above, namely that the fact that both have the breath of the spirit of life is not enough to indicate that ‘death’ as a consequence of sin encompasses both in the absence of any explicit text to that effect and against the lines of evidence drawing a distinction between humans and everything else.<br /><br />But I’ll add a small extra point just to point out (again) how this kind of approach only selectively reads the Bible literally.<br /><br />In the Flood, God states his intention as: <blockquote>Genesis 6:17 And behold, I, even I am bringing the flood of water upon the earth, to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life, from under heaven; everything that is on the earth shall perish.</blockquote>Here God states that he intends to destroy <em>all</em> flesh in which is the breath of life, ‘from under heaven’, and then restates it in good Hebrew parallelism with a complementary statement: ‘everything that is on the earth shall perish’. So all flesh under heaven which has the breath of life shall be destroyed and all life on the earth shall perish.<br /><br />This suggests, fairly straightforwardly: <ol><li><em>everything</em> that has the breath of life will die.</li><br /><br /><li><em>everything</em> that lives on the earth will die. </li></ol>And this is what happened:<br /><br /><blockquote>Genesis 7:21-23 And all flesh that moved on the earth perished, birds and cattle and beasts and every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind; of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, died. Thus He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky, and they were blotted out from the earth; and only Noah was left, together with those that were with him in the ark.</blockquote>All ‘in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life’ died. All ‘living things that were upon the face of the land’ were blotted out. Only Noah and those in the ark were left.<br /><br />The problem is what do we do about life in the water?<br /><br />Is it classified as having ‘the breath of life’ in it? Do turtles, dolphins, whales, and seals have the breath of life? How about fish life? If so, then they should be included in the total death that God was brought through the flood.<br /><br />Yet, that can’t be done because they don’t live on the earth, and the two terms (has breath of life/lives on the earth) are in parallel. This therefore suggests that they are <em>not</em> included as entities that have the breath of life in them. They are effectively ‘plant life’.<br /><br />And so we get the bizarre position that the death of land animals and birds is the result of Adamn's sin, but the death of water life (mammal and fish) is not….<br /><br />In fact, the Flood, like Genesis 2, has <em>no</em> interest in water life <em>at all</em>. And this in an account which another part of the Bible (2 Peter 3) states is an account of the destruction of the world on a par with the destruction by fire of the Day of Judgement! It again suggests that it isn’t trying to answer scientific questions…<br /><br />This is a bit of an excursus, but the basic point is to show that ‘having the breath of the spirit of life’ is not the primary category of division. It is not animate life on the one hand and plant life on the other as the big issue when it comes to ‘death’. For in the great OT experience of the day of judgement, water life is left out of this division (and that’s a lot of life to be left out if you’re concerned about trying to square things with science).<br /><br />So, I’d suggest the following:<br /><br /><ol><li>The Bible makes a far bigger division between human life and the rest of creation than between animate life and plant life. </li><br /><br /><li>Life and death is primarily linked to humanity. </li><br /><br /><li>The link between sin and death is <em>only</em> linked to humanity </li><br /><br /><li>Animal death as the consequence of Adam’s sin is nowhere explicitly stated by the Bible.</li></ol>Accordingly, I’d suggest the best way to submit to the Bible’s teaching on this subject is to (at a minimum) profess no position on the relationship of animal death and human sin (which still means that animals dying before Adam's sin is not a theological issue) or (at a maximum) follow the trajectory of the Bible’s teaching that ‘death’ as a wage for sin relates to humans <em>only</em>.<br /><br />In other words, death is natural for Fido, and is a scandal for human beings. That’s why we have funerals for humans but don’t (or at least shouldn’t) for animals. ‘Death’ is more than just ‘cessation of biological activity’. Looked at theologically, it means something very different when a human dies and when an animal dies. Humans were never meant to die. Animals were never intended to have eternal life, <em>because they are not human beings and are not in the Image of the eternal God</em>.<br /><br />Or in other words, Christ came into the world to save sinners, which means he came to save human beings, not dogs or cats or humpback whales. Redemption may catch them up as well (and it may open up a kind of life for them that is radically new), as it brings in a New Heavens and a New Earth that is different from everything that has gone before it. Nonetheless, the gospel of salvation from sin and death is for the children of Adam alone.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-84362025056048243002007-11-22T12:11:00.000-08:002007-11-23T02:13:46.917-08:00Problems With Creation Science III: A Tale of Two ChronologiesI dislike the way various Creation Scientists I have encountered handle the relationship of Genesis 1 and 2.<br /><br />On the face of it, the first two chapters of Genesis give differing accounts of the formation of the world. Whether you then see that as complementary perspectives or a fundamental disagreement that Moses was too stupid to pick up reflects your basic stance towards the Bible (and your I.Q. in my view. Do you <em> really</em> think that wouldn’t have been noticed?)<br /><br />Genesis 1 recounts the creation of the heavens and the earth over six days, with plants coming into existence on day three, birds and water creatures on day four, and animals being created on day five before humanity, which is presented as being created male and female in one hit. All these things were made just by the simple word of God. God said, ‘let there be…’ and there was. <br /><br />Genesis 2 recounts the creation of the heavens and the earth ‘on the day (same word as for the seven days of Genesis 1) they were created’. In Genesis 2 man is created first. Then plants are created just to make a garden (the rest of the earth is bare of plant life due to a lack of rain, <em>and</em> a lack of human cultivation—suggesting a fairly critical role for humanity in the filling of the world with life). Then God creates animal and bird life together (no mention of water life being created at all). Then he creates the woman. In <em>none</em> of the cases of man, woman, animal or bird does God create with just a word. Man, animals, and birds are fashioned out of the dirt. Woman is fashioned from Man’s rib. (Only plants, interestingly enough, are created the same in each chapter: both are produced by the earth, one part of creation being used to create another part).<br /><br />The chronologies of the two passages cannot be reconciled. Neither can the modes of creation be <em>easily</em> reconciled. This would seem to suggest that what we have here is quite possibly a non-literal account of creation in <em>either</em> chapter or in <em>both</em> chapters. That is, having two parallel accounts suggests that the interest is not in giving you an eyewitness account, but in disclosing the meaning of creation, to interpret the world you live in for you. It’s true, but it’s not scientific truth (any more than Christ’s death paying the penalty for our sins is a scientific truth. How would you experimentally validate it?)<br /><br />However, the guys I was chatting with, like most Creation Scientists I have encountered, insisted that chapter one <em>has</em> to be taken as a literal, eyewitness account. Hence, they were prepared to take chapter 2 as not offering an actual, trustworthy chronology (you can see the irony here I hope). The literal nature of Genesis 1 was secured, from what I could make out (it was, as I said, a difficult conversation, so it wasn’t always easy to work out what substantial points they were making) by appeal to Exodus 20:<br /><br /><blockquote>Exodus 20:8-11 "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. "Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. "For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.</blockquote><br />Here, the argument seemed to go, another part of the Bible is taking Genesis 1 as speaking of seven concrete twenty-four days as the reason for the Sabbath command. Therefore, Genesis 1 is to be taken literally, and Genesis 2 less so.<br /><br />The difficulty, is that the NT draws upon the chronology of chapter 2 <em>and not the chronology of chapter 1</em> to make its points about how to live:<br /><br /><blockquote>1 Timothy 2:11-15 Let a woman quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet. For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve. And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being quite deceived, fell into transgression. </blockquote><br /><blockquote>1 Corinthians 11:7-9 For a man ought not to have his head covered, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man. For man does not originate from woman, but woman from man; for indeed man was not created for the woman's sake, but woman for the man's sake.</blockquote><br />In both passages, implications for how men and women are to live are drawn from the chronology of Genesis 2.<br /><br />It could be suggested that this is the only part of chapter 2 that is a literal chronology—that in the sixth day of creation, God made man first, some of the stuff of chapter 2 ‘kind of’ happened and then Eve was created. But that kind of speculative exegesis is exceptionally strained and distorts the meaning of <em>both</em> chapters—you’ve essentially fused them together to create your own Genesis chapter 1.5.<br /><br />In other words, <em>even for the Creation Scientist</em> another part of the Bible can appeal to the chronology of a ‘non-literal’ part of Genesis to make authorative demands on God’s people. Exodus 20 appeals to days in chapter one. Paul appeals to the chronology of chapter two. And <em>both</em> Genesis 1 <em>and</em> Genesis 2 can’t be historical chronologies, because they can’t be reconciled.<br /><br />Whichever way you go there, you can’t just point to a passage like Exodus 20 to show that the days are meant to be historical twenty-four days and Genesis 2 is less literal. Because the exact same argument can be derived from Paul to ‘prove’ the historical chronology of chapter 2 and hence the less literal nature of chapter <em>one</em>. <br /><br />And if the same type of argument can be run twice from the same body of evidence to deduce mutually incompatible results, that indicates that <em>the argument itself is wrong.</em> <br /><br />One part of the Bible using the chronology of Genesis to establish a point about how God’s people are to live shows that Genesis is designed to tell us how to live. It doesn’t establish that it was meant to offer us a ‘better science’, by telling us what we would have seen if we had been there.<br /><br />It may do that as well, but the Sabbath command doesn’t prove it.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-72460309888177990292007-11-21T08:19:00.000-08:002007-11-21T10:08:24.385-08:00Problems with Creation Science II: On Taking the Bible LiterallyCreation Science wants to claim that it takes the Bible literally and alternative approaches don’t (they don’t take literally things that disagree with science), and so it can claim to be the right position fairly easily.<br /><br />The problem is that, as far as I can see, Creation Science doesn’t take things literally, but shies away from literal readings of things that disagree with those bits of science that they accept. <br /><br />The most well known example is probably the second day of creation:<br /><br /><blockquote>Genesis 1:6-8 Then God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." And God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so. And God called the expanse heaven.</blockquote><br />A literal reading of this isn’t hard to see. The cosmos is full of water, and to create the space for land to appear God first creates an expanse (or firmament, the word suggests a <em>physical</em> barrier) that separates the waters that were below from the waters above. This physical barrier is called heaven. <br /><br />Then dry land appears on the third day when God gathers the waters under the expanse and locks them into fixed locations—oceans, seas, lakes etc, and so dry land appears. <br /><br />So the <em>literal</em> picture is of a universe full of water where God creates a space for earth to exist. One suspects that that fits neatly with the fact that we see blue when we look up—we’re looking at the water on the other side of the barrier, heaven. <br /><br />If, however, science calls the shots, then that is nonsense. And so Creation Scientists will, when pushed, read this <em>non-literally</em>. It is a metaphor (or ‘poetic’). The most common suggestion I’ve heard is that pre-Flood the earth was covered in a permanent blanket of thick clouds. It’s a strained reading (and is strange science. Unless they think physical laws changed with the Flood, why wouldn’t this cloud cover build up again after the Flood?) Their exegesis at this point is hard to understand, unless they draw back from readings of Scripture that they are fairly sure don’t square with the world as they know it. In fact, 2 Peter seems fairly straightforwardly to read Genesis the way I've suggested: <br /><br /><blockquote>2 Peter 3:5-7 For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water...</blockquote><br /><br />The earth was formed <em>out of</em> water and <em>by</em> water. This suggests water being more significant to Genesis 1’s picture of creation than the idea of a thick cloud cover above the earth.<br /><br />And this world in the midst of water makes much better sense of the Flood:<br /><br /><blockquote>Genesis 7:11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened.</blockquote><br />The barriers that made a division between water above and water below and water below and dry land and are taken away. The water pours in and covers the land:<br /><br /><blockquote>Genesis 7:18-20 And the water prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark floated on the surface of the water. And the water prevailed more and more upon the earth, so that all the high mountains everywhere under the heavens were covered. The water prevailed fifteen cubits higher, and the mountains were covered.</blockquote><br />Two things I want to point out here. First, the amount of water involved in covering every mountain on the earth is far in excess of the amount of water that we are, pretty sure, exists on the planet. Speculations (such as I’ve heard by Creation Scientists) that what happened was a lot of water coming together into a series of large tidal wave-like phenomena are not what the text is saying, it’s another fudge. The text is painting a picture of constant rain and water coming out of the depths of the earth <em>covering</em> the land, not of a periodic wave smashing everything to bits. That’s why the waters subside over a <em>long</em> period of time rather than waves just ceasing. And how the ark would survive waves like that is beyond me—at that point you’d have to leave science behind again and suggest another miracle to preserve the wooden ship (which then raises the question of why a ship at all?).<br /><br />The second thing I want to point out is that the preoccupation to read this passage in the light of science misses the <em>meaning</em> of the passage. The Flood is held up in the NT as a type of the final destruction of the universe by fire. Back to 2 Peter again:<br /><br /><blockquote>2 Peter 3:5-7 For when they maintain this, it escapes their notice that by the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water, through which the world at that time was destroyed, being flooded with water. But the present heavens and earth by His word are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.</blockquote><br /><blockquote>2 Peter 3:10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.</blockquote><br />It’s not just a lot of water killing off all land creatures. It’s more than that. It is meant to suggest the end of creation, ‘the world at that time was destroyed’. Flooding the world with water is supposed to get a point across that is far more than just a huge natural catastrophe. It was the undoing of creation. The world was made out of water and by water, as the waters above and below were separated by an expanse called heaven, and the waters below were separated from the dry land. <br /><br />When the floodgates of the sky and fountains of the deep are opened then this basic structure that enables life ceased. The world returned to its formless and void state—no separation between waters or between water and land, and no life. The world was destroyed.<br /><br />Again, if you’re exegeting the Bible through science that’s nonsense. Matter, energy, space, time, all exist. There’s still a planet, there’s still a universe. Nonetheless the Bible portrays the Flood as on a par with the final Day of Judgement, the world was destroyed by water and will be destroyed by fire.<br /><br />Thus, the Flood has a cosmic theological significance. It was the undoing of creation, just as much as the Day of Judgement will spell the end of this world and the beginning of the New Earth and the New Heaven.<br /><br />I take it that is why there is that obscure note in Revelation:<br /><br /><blockquote>Revelation 21:1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea.</blockquote><br />Why is there no sea in the new heavens and earth? If you put the science away for a moment and think about the <em>significance</em> of water in Genesis 1-8 then I think it comes into light. Water is related to that formless and void state at the beginning of creation. <br /><br /><blockquote>Genesis 1:2 And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.</blockquote><br />Here, before anything is said by God, there are apparently waters over which the Spirit of God moves. Again, if science is in the driving seat, you either have to say that creation began before God said anything in verse 3 (‘Let there be light’). Or you could accept what seems fairly obvious, that ‘water’ signifies more than just physical water. It signifies the formless and void state before there was a creation. <br /><br />Hence, the end of the Flood is meant to allude to Genesis 1:2<br /><br /><blockquote>Genesis 7:24 - 8:1 And the water prevailed upon the earth one hundred and fifty days. But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the cattle that were with him in the ark; and God caused a wind to pass over the earth, and the water subsided.</blockquote><br />The word for ‘wind’ in 8:2 that passed over the earth is exactly the same as the word for the ‘Spirit’ in 1:2 who hovered over the water. The end of the Flood conjures up the picture of creation.<br /><br />That’s why the Flood is linked with the final end of the Universe by fire, because large bodies of ‘water’ is meant to conjure up the original formless and void state. The fact that creation could be so easily undone by God just taking away the barriers gets at the inherent impermanence and insecurity of the Universe. At any moment it could be swamped by inrushing uncreation and return to nothing. Hence, the great statement of OT trust in God:<br /><br /><blockquote>Psalm 46:1-3 God is our refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, And though the mountains slip into the heart of the sea; Though its waters roar and foam, Though the mountains quake at its swelling pride. Selah.</blockquote><br />It’s not just an earthquake that is being put forward here, it is the cosmos coming apart at the edges. Even in the face of <em>that</em> God is our refuge, so we will not fear. That's a powerful statement of security in God!<br /><br />So ‘sea’ would be a bit like the snake in the garden, or the ability of Adam and Eve to disobey God. It gets at the fact that while the creation is good, it does not have the imperishable glory of the New Creation. Creation is vulnerable, guarded only by the word of God that keeps the basic structures that makes life possible, and that light the path for humanity to walk in the light. This word of God is questioned, challenged, disobeyed, and with it life is turned to death and creation is in constant danger of being undone.<br /><br />Yet the New Creation has Christ as its head. It participates in and lives in him. And so it will have no snake, no sin, no possibility of death, and no sea. It will not have any chance of being undone. It will be immortal, invincible, secured by its unbreakable link to the eternal Son of God who is its head.<br /><br />All these connections are in danger of being overlooked when one finds the Bible’s talk of an expanse scandalous in light of modern scientific knowledge, and so explain it away.<br /><br />The result is a strained reading that is arid and untheological and that obscures connections within the Scriptures. It’s also not literal.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com55tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-9978230754632360932007-11-21T08:04:00.000-08:002007-11-21T09:53:18.762-08:00Problems With Creation Science I: Absence of a Theology of CreationMy encounter with this anti-Sydney Diocese blog has strengthened my concerns about Creation Science. As I’ve indicated, I don’t have a problem with the idea of a literal six day creation in the abstract. What does concern me is that, almost without exception in my experience, people who are into creation science seem to be disinterested in theology, and in understanding the world theologically.<br /><br />I have lost count of the number of videos, magazine articles, internet articles, and teaching sessions I’ve been part of that have gone over Genesis 1, the Flood, and Behemoth from Job 40. And it is always the same. These passages are mined to show:<br /><br /><ol><li>That the world is 8 000 years old </li><li>That if we had been there, we would have seen that Genesis 1 gives us a journalistic account of how creation came about. That is, it is pretty much what we would have seen with our own eyes. </li><li>That there was a flood that covered the world with water, and so contemporary geological theories are fatally flawed. </li><li>That there were dinosaurs still in existence at the time of Job.</li></ol><br /><br />These might be true or not, but none of them really touch on the core concerns of the Bible. These are the kind of questions that are of interest primarily to post-enlightenment empiricism. They are scientific questions about the world.<br /><br />What is always passed over (and so one presumes that it is considered uninteresting or unimportant) is the theological interpretation of the world. Some examples include:<br /><br />The way in which creation comes about in the first three days by creating order through making divisions—light versus day, heaven versus earth, land versus sea. And then the second set of three days seems to return to these basic structures and fill them: sun, moon on day four; birds and sea creatures on day five, land creatures and humanity on day six. This suggests a basic understanding of creation as being structured through binary opposition and then filled. Thus, in Genesis 1 we get a move from the original state: formless (no structure) and void (empty) and finish with a structured universe in which entities exist. When one sees that making a separation between two things is fundamental to creation, then, for example, the holiness laws, with their separation into holy and profane, clean and unclean, make far more sense.<br /><br />What is also passed over is the way in which creation exists to serve humanity:<br /><br /><blockquote>Genesis 1:14-18 Then God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth"; and it was so. And God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also. And God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good.<br /></blockquote><br />Here the existence of the sun and the moon are explained simply as to give light to the world and to regulate day and night. They, along with the stars exist simply to regulate seasons, days and years. They are the celestial equivalent of a wrist watch.<br /><br />That’s hardly a scientific answer. What about stars we never see on earth without the aid of, very, very powerful telescopes? What about the sun’s role in keeping the solar system stuck together, and providing energy for the other planets? What about the other planets in the solar system, or asteroids? What about the fact that the stars are actually other suns?<br /><br />But it is a <em>powerful</em> theological answer. Humanity regularly falls into worshipping the sun, the moon, and the stars or awarding them immense power over our lives, as astrology indicates. Here Genesis 1 shows us that they are not lords over the earth. They are mere servants. Night lights for human beings. They exist for our sake.<br /><br />And this is the clear teaching of the NT:<br /><br /><blockquote>1 Timothy 6:17 Instruct those who are rich in this present world not to be conceited or to fix their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly supplies us with all things to enjoy.</blockquote><br /><blockquote>1 Timothy 4:3-5 …men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods, which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected, if it is received with gratitude; for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer.</blockquote><br />Everything made by God is good, and so nothing is inherently off limits. The fact that this world has been filled with good things (as Genesis 1 painstakingly shows with it’s enunciation of the six day process of setting the universe up) tells us something about <em>God</em>, that God ‘richly supplies us with all things’. That is, that God is superabundantly generous to the human race.<br /><br />It also tells us the stance we are to have towards the world. God has given us all things for us ‘to enjoy’. Christianity is pro-aesthetic. Things in the world are <em>good</em> and so should be enjoyed for their own sake. Christianity is anti-ascetic: advocating the abstaining from foods and forbidding marriage (and I would suggest that these are indicative examples, not intended to exhaust the kinds of things people who teach demonic doctrines (from 1 Tim 4:1-2) might say) is criticised in some of the harshest language Paul ever uses.<br /><br />The purpose God had for creating things was so that those of us who believe and know the truth (i.e. are Christians) would gratefully share in them, sanctifying them by our reception of the word of God (believing the gospel) and prayer. That is, we are to enjoy things, and to enjoy things in a non-secular way. We are to enjoy the world as a gift from God, and so be grateful to God for it, and pray to use things for the purposes God gave them for. What we don’t do is find our security, or place our hope in the abundance of good things we have. We recognise God alone as the giver of life, and the giver of all good things.<br /><br />Hence, the call on Christians to deny themselves, to pursue Christ wholeheartedly, to live a life of sacrificial love for others, needs to be understood against this backdrop. Christians are to forego enjoying the things of this world. But that is because of the demands of faith and love in the last days—the days when the ascended Christ rules over this rebellious world and all his enemies are being put under his feet. It is forgoing the good out of love, it is not asceticism for asceticism’s sake. Because everything is given for our good, we are free to use or not use them, depending on the demands of the circumstances in the context of love.<br /><br />For me, this has transformed the way I relate to creation and tackle issues from alcohol, to culture and art, to work, and love of money. And I haven’t even begun to touch on the strong NT teaching about the relationship between the Lord Jesus Christ and creation!<br /><br />And here’s the problem. It was only <em>after</em> I stopped reading Creation Science stuff on the topic and started reading material that they consider to have fatally compromised on the doctrine of creation, that my eyes were opened to begin to grasp this much bigger vista of a theological approach to the world.<br /><br />Even if Genesis 1 is intended to be taken literally, I am very grateful that God has allowed me to grasp this way of seeing the world as existing as his good gift to his people, to be enjoyed with gratitude. I consider myself to have gained by losing the one to gain the other. Grasping this world as God’s good gift changes everything. It gives purpose and meaning, not just to human beings, but to all things.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-11505787386836942432007-11-21T06:06:00.000-08:002007-11-21T10:13:19.947-08:00The Day The Music DiedI have recently brought an end to a very discouraging couple of weeks on another blog. I was informed that there existed a blog written to declare to the world that the Sydney Diocese was heretical for not being adherents to Creation Science. I went over with the intention of getting an understanding of where they were coming from (and discovered that others had tried to speak to them, some under their own names like Michael, others anonymously). I was, to put it mildly, surprised that a group of people would write a blog for no other purpose than to call the Diocese heretical on a secondary point of doctrine.<br /><br />In the end I decided to start a conversation (or argument, the two are fairly synonymous in these contexts) with some of the contributors. There were a couple of reasons why.<br /><br />The first is that I had been a Creation Scientist up until my mid 20’s—I naturally tend towards taking biblical passages at their most straightforward and literal sense, and Creation Science tends to be a litmus test of orthodoxy in evangelical type circles in Brisbane.<br /><br />I moved away from the position while still in Brisbane for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons will become clearer in some of what I say later. It wasn’t a full move. I’m still fairly sceptical about evolution, and I think it’s pretty obvious that there is no currently workable theory about life beginning on earth given current models of earth’s atmosphere and the like—one of the reasons why renown atheist philosopher Anthony Flew turned theist. But the objections are primarily scientific rather than theological. If ‘evolution’ turns out to be true I doubt it will matter. I believe God can work within nature and against it. Both nature and supernature are in the hands of God to accomplish his purposes.<br /><br />I have moved away from any idea of a young earth. This is because of scientific reasons, not geology, but astronomy. Unless current astronomic theory is fatally flawed in multiple areas (which has been known to happen in science, but that’s not really a basis for dissenting, it’s a bit too sceptical in the bad sense) then it would seem that we receive information here on earth about events that occurred a long, long, long, long time ago (about things far, far, far, far away). So, the universe is old. (But again, if that’s wrong and science returns to an 8 000 year old cosmos, I don’t think that will somehow ‘vindicate the Bible’. If people won’t accept the apostles’ testimony about Jesus’ resurrection from the dead I doubt a young cosmos, or finding Noah’s Ark, will suddenly create faith).<br /><br />So, I’m not a creation scientist. First, because I think the universe is old. But more importantly, because I think it’s a scientific question first and foremost, and not a biblical question. But I think that science is demonstrably fallible, and that a literal reading of Genesis 1 has a good pedigree in church history, so as a theological position a literal reading of Genesis 1 has credibility for me. So I’m willing to listen to the concerns of Creation Scientists.<br /><br />The second main reason why I started the discussion is that I have been noticing (particularly since the Diocese’s 10% goal, interestingly enough) a number of accusations of heresy (or something similar) against the Sydney Diocese. Obviously, there is the subordinationism charge that I’ve been involved with. And I’ve spoken with Anglicans who consider any idea of lay presidency at the Lord’s Supper as ‘heretical’. But these charges are from areas far more theologically divergent in their views of Scripture and the nature of the gospel.<br /><br />More troubling is that I’ve also heard of graduates of Moore being hassled in Presbyterian circles for not caring about ‘true worship’ when the church gathers, and people writing off their ministries as (more or less) ‘heretical’. There’s also been criticism from some overseas quarters, I understand, because Moore engages with some of the contemporary non-evangelical theologians and isn’t only critical of them. Creation Science seems to be the other main area of complaint, generally voiced by people who seem to think that almost every problem in the modern world can be traced back to evolution and so see any position other than an explicitly anti-science literal reading of Genesis 1 (and both the anti-science and the literal reading are necessary) as surrendering the farm.<br /><br />My trouble at this point is that I don’t like people thinking I’m (or those I’m connected to) a heretic. Strange of me, I know. But heresy is a very serious charge. A heretic is so wrong theologically that they cannot be saved. I take theology seriously, but ‘heresy’ is the theological equivalent of WMDs. Bringing it out is far more serious than conventional theological criticisms that such and such a view ‘isn’t in line with the Bible’, ‘dishonours Christ’, ‘is potentially fatal to the coherence of the Christian faith’ or the like. ‘Heresy’ is in a class all of its own.<br /><br />When the people making this accusation against me are theologically divergent themselves (not accepting the creeds, or rejecting Scripture as the word of God) then the accusation can (almost) be a badge of honour. But when the criticisms come from closer to home, so to speak, I take the concerns more to heart. Ironically, if it had been a thread on a forum just generally discussing evolution versus creation science I would have yawned and moved on. But a charge of heresy makes things far more serious.<br /><br />The final reason for talking is that I have pursued a policy of deliberating engaging people who I might otherwise disregard, because they’re ‘obviously’ wrong. This is partly because I think true humility is shown by taking seriously even people who seem unlikely to be right. If we are sinners, and can’t trust that our minds will always add two plus two to get four (and I would have thought any experience of human beings will produce countless examples of otherwise sane and intelligent people who, in some situation or area of life, can’t see the nose on their face <em>while looking in the mirror</em>) then sometimes we are going to be most wrong when we think that it’s ‘just obvious’ that we’re right. There’s no silver bullet to this dynamic, but being prepared to hear out people and reconsider what they say has to help, particularly when it is a corollary to our sitting in humility under the enscripturated Word.<br /><br />So I started a conversation. Given my approach things, it was a debate or argument. I have never thought (and still don’t) that listening to another person carefully means just agreeing with them or not challenging what they are saying. Truly listening can mean pushing them on areas of their position that you find problematic or unconvincing, so that they have the chance to try again to win you at that point.<br /><br />However, this conversation went badly. I thought that would happen. But it managed to match some of the worst expectations I could set (and I’m a pessimist). It went <em>very</em> badly. It was unpleasant, and both Jen and I breathed a sigh of relief when it came to an end, the spiritual atmosphere at home lifted enormously. Given just how bad it was, I think it’s probably worth some reflection, so I’ll be doing that over the next couple of entries.<br /><br />By the way, for the curious or aggressive reader out there, please don’t go searching out the blog with the intention of ‘putting them right’. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s one of those groups that <em>needs</em> an enemy to feel that it’s truly ‘doing the Lord’s work’. If you have to track the blog down (and I’d advise against it, there’s much more positive expressions of Creation Science on the net) then I’d suggest not making comments. I don’t think it’ll have any kind of positive effect, sad to say.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-40920223095509815972007-11-16T09:54:00.000-08:002007-11-16T09:55:30.932-08:00And You Were Doing So WellI have been working on Origen for the first of my (probably) two research projects. I’ve been thinking about how the thinking about the relationship between the Father and the Son and the relationship between the Godhead and creation develops between the Apologists in the second century and Origen in the third.<br /><br />It’s been an interesting couple of weeks, and my opinion about Origen has been steadily growing as I read more of him, and not just rely upon common stereotypes. In particular, I think I’m fairly sceptical of his reputation that he’s a Platonist of any shape or kind. Origen clearly combines both a deep mind and a rigorously biblical mind. Many of his problems seem to appear, not because he imposes cultural ideas of his time upon Scripture, but because he’s prepared to be very radical in his exegesis and integration of Scripture. Sometimes that pays off amazingly and he helps formulate the nucleus of ideas that later Fathers develop. Sometimes it misfires badly. The following quote is in the latter camp, I stumbled across it after several pages of great stuff, and thought I’d share my disappointment. <br /><br /><blockquote>Since the Saviour through the illumination and salvation given to him by the Father fears nothing…secretly he asked for another (death) which would have been more of an ordeal, so that by a different cup he might achieve more benefits. This was not the will of the Father which was wiser than the will of the Son or the Saviour’s vision as he ordered the economy of the events. Ex. Mart. 29</blockquote><br />Origen here is one of the first theologians to grapple with one of the issues that Christians keep returning to—what do we make of the prayer of Gethsamane? What does it mean for Jesus to pray for something to happen which wasn’t in the Father’s will? It’s a big issue where wisdom suggests a fair degree of caution in how one approaches the matter.<br /><br />And there’s something impressive about Origen’s freshness in how he reads the Bible. He doesn’t assume that asking the cup to pass from him means that Jesus is trying to avoid death. He looks at outside the box and suggests that it meant that Jesus wanted an even more intense kind of death than crucifixion. And looking outside the box is a good ability to have—if we are going to avoid just reading our own ideas into the Bible, it’ll only be because we’re prepared to take roads not just less travelled, but never travelled.<br /><br />But this is one time when staying in the box would have been <em>so</em> much better. Origen’s concern in context appears to be the incongruity between the idea that Jesus shrank from death in contrast to the courage of Christian martyrs. Origen’s own father was martyred and (debatably) his mother only prevented Origen from joining him by hiding his clothes. (Embarrassment for a seventeen year old male was as effective then as now).<br /><br />But the solution here is disastrous. The idea that deaths can be ranked and some deaths might achieve more benefits because their ordeal is greater—as though Christ’s death worked by some kind of mechanistic rule completely undercuts the Biblical idea that death is death is death. There’s no ‘good’ ‘bad’ or ‘worse’ death. <em>We</em> might find certain ways of dying really difficult and have our own lists of ‘ways I’d rather go’ (burning to death, for example, can’t say I’m a fan. Dying in my sleep? Or dying by being hit by a meteor by surprise. I could live with that.) But from the point of view of the meaning of death, death is death. It’s judgement. And it’s an enemy. <br /><br />Even worse is that Origen explains the prayer and answer in terms of a difference in wisdom between the Father and the Son, as though the Son isn’t quite as wise as the Father is. I think for once I’m at a loss for words… MDBBaddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-47222037475144545372007-11-05T15:49:00.000-08:002007-11-05T15:56:18.871-08:00Eusebius of Caesarea Contra AulenGustaf Aulen wrote a seminal little book called <em>Christus Victor</em>. In it he sets out three accounts of the atonement—what Christ accomplished by his life, death, and resurrection. The three accounts he saw as dominant over the past 2000 years of reflection upon the meaning of Jesus’s death were:<br /><br />1. Jesus’ death was to satisfy the Father’s justice, paying the penalty for our sins. Here the notions of justice, and of the death being directed to the Father predominate. It also tends to be explained in legal terms—and so reflects a purely Western hang-up with legality.<br /><br />2. Jesus’ death paid the ransom for our release from Satan’s tyranny. In the hands of certain thinkers, Jesus’ death is actually paid <em>to</em> Satan.<br /><br />3. Jesus’ death defeated Satan and so rescued us from his tyranny. You get a version of this in C.S. Lewis’ <em>The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe</em>.<br /><br />Aulen is quite passionate about his subject, and I have listed the views of the atonement in ascending order of his appreciation of them. That is, he <em>really doesn’t like</em> the idea that Jesus’ death pays the penalty for our sins. He can sort of live with the idea that it is a ransom. And he <em>loves</em> the idea of the atonement as the defeat of Satan (hence the name of his book…). <br /><br />One of the ideas that has become ‘common knowledge’ since his book is that of these three views, only the latter two really exist in the Early Church. The first view doesn’t really appear until Anselm, and is then picked up by Reformers and Roman Catholic Church alike.<br /><br />However, a number of scholars have shown that Aulen’s nice little schema is (at best) over statement of the evidence—more of an impressionistic advocacy for his view than a carefully considered statement of the evidence overall.<br /><br />And today I came across another example of the satisfaction view of the atonement as I was reading Eusebius for a research paper on the Trinity and Creation. Eusebius offers two reasons for the death of Christ.<br /><br />First, that by dying and coming back to life, Jesus showed that the promise of resurrection that he offered his followers was stronger than death. It was the only way to convince us that there is a certain hope for us.<br /><br />Second, by dying and coming back to life, Jesus manifests his own invincible power over death as the Lord of Life. To be in death’s grasp and to uncurl death’s fingers from the inside of his palm—that underscores Christ’s deity in a way that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. <br /><br />So far, these would fit under the <em>Christus Victor</em> idea. But then Eusebius gives us the final reason. It’s a long quote, but bear with it: <br /><br /><blockquote>I may offer you even a third reason to account for the salutary death. He was a sacrifice offered up to the All-Ruling God of the Universe on behalf of the entire human race, a victim consecrated on behalf of the flock of mankind, a sacrificial victim for averting demonic error. And in fact, once this one great sacrificial victim, the All-Holy Body of Our Saviour, had been slaughtered on behalf of the human race and atonement offered for all races formerly ensnared in the impiety of demonic error, thereafter all the power of the impure and unholy demons was destroyed, and all earthbound and guileful error immediately yielded to a stronger power and was done away with. Thus was the salutary sacrifice—that is the physical instrument of the Logos—taken from the midst of men and consecrated on behalf of the common flock of mankind. This, then, was the offering given over to death about which the work of Holy Writ proclaimed, here saying, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” there predicting that “He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not his mouth.” They also give the reason, declaring: “Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes are we healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Thus the physical instrument of the divine Logos was sacrificed for these reasons. But He who is the Great High Priest dedicated to the All-Ruling and Almighty God, who is distinguished from the sacrificial victim as the Logos of God, the Power of God, and the Wisdom of God, not long after recalled His mortal body from the dead and presented it to the Father as the prototype of our common salvation, having raised it on behalf of mankind as a trophy of victory over death and the demonic host, and a safeguard against the human sacrifices that formerly were performed. <em>Oration “On Christ’s Sepulchre”</em></blockquote><br />Now Eusebius is a bit of a dark horse. He was a Bishop of the fourth century. He signed the Nicene Creed, but was a defender of Arius and many of Arius’ views. He and Athanasius were, shall we say, not the best of buddies. So it would be easy to dismiss this little statement as the marginal comment of a heretic. But Eusebius was also an astute Church leader who had the respect of much of the Church and the newly converted Emperor Constantine for his learning and moderation. Eusebius saw his own view on the Person of Christ (incorrectly, but not without <em>some</em> justification) as the traditional view. He wasn’t an innovator by temperament. He was also well respected in his day—one of the reasons why Arianism got the support it did. None of these square with the picture of someone who was coming up with weird and wonderful ideas left, right, and centre. So these words he uttered in his sermon were most likely uncontroversial.<br /><br />And what we find here is a fairly straightforward statement of Jesus’ death as a sacrifice offered up to the Father with John’s comment of the Lamb of God being understood in light of the Suffering Servant Passages in Isaiah—classic sacrificial atonement ways of interpreting Christ’s death. Indeed the Isaianic passages appear to have so shaped his thinking at this point that the language there of us being <em>sheep</em> that have gone astray, appears to have affected the way he speaks about humanity calling us “the common <em>flock</em> of mankind.<br /><br />Now the preoccupation with evil spiritual forces are there, with the mention of ‘demonic error’. And there’s some dodgy stuff coming out of Eusebius’ poor Christology when he suggests that Christ’s <em>body</em> is the sacrifice while the Word <em>himself</em> is the Priest who offers it, rather than grasping that Christ is both Priest and Sacrifice. <br /><br />Nonetheless, even if it can be shown that the Early Church tended to speak in terms of victory and ransom more often, it’s another piece of evidence that sacrificial language is hardly a legal or mediaeval innovation. Eusebius explains it at some length in fairly classic terms. And Eusebius is no legal-minded Western Churchman. He is as Eastern as the rising sun.<br /><br />Another bit of evidence to show that a sacrificial view of the atonement isn't just at the heart of the Biblical material. It is also every bit as classic as other accounts.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-8204985902306502012007-11-01T09:36:00.000-07:002007-11-02T14:04:07.842-07:00Irenaeus: Nice Guy TheologianIrenaeus presents things in a whole different light.<br /><br /><strong>The Fall as a Stumble, and God as a Patient Father</strong><br />Western theology (Protestant and Catholic), it is generally held (with good reason, it has to be said) to be very legal in its presentation of God and his ways. God gives a perfect and uncompromising law, Adam and Eve willfully rebelled, God justly imposed death and other catastrophes upon them and their descendants. Even redemption is understood primarily in terms of God's justice being satisfied. There are lots of debates about 'justification'. Legality seems to structure Western theology in many places, with the result that God often appears fairly stern and unyielding even when showing grace and mercy.<br /><br />Irenaeus gives a very different impression. Like mainstream theologians generally, Irenaeus is clear that Adam’s disobedience was disastrous. As a consequence of his disobedience, Adam and his progeny find themselves under the dominion of death and Satan, and cut off from participation in God. These aren't good things - they attack the good intentions that God had for humanity when he made us.<br /><br />However, Irenaeus’ view of the Fall contains features that arguably mitigate its seriousness compared to more common Western accounts. Irenaeus is of the view that Adam and Eve were children in the garden, not adults. They weren't made fully fledged perfect human beings in a static sense. Creatures only learn things over time and so in the Garden they were effectively small children (and maybe even physically so). Hence their disobedience was not calculating adult rebellion. It was the weakness and ineptitude of the young. It was tragic, but just a little bit less culpable.<br /><br />There is more.<br /><br />What do we make of God's decision to withhold the tree of life from Adam and Eve after their disobedience? The Western tradition generally sees this as judgement--Adam and Eve have the possibility of eternal life taken away. Irenaeus sees this act as an act of mercy. If they ate of that fruit they would live eternally in their current state. And what could be worse than eternal life under the tyranny of Satan rather than under the rule of the One who is Life and Blessing? So this, in Irenaeus, is <em>mercy</em>, not judgement.<br /><br />Similarly, Irenaeus makes much of the fact that the curse falls on the ground rather than on Adam directly. He sees this as further evidence that when God deals with Adam and Eve in their primordial sin, the traits of patience, mercy and forgiveness are in the foreground. He sees Adam and Eve hiding and making fig leaf clothes as signs of repentance, not just shame. And argues that this repentance moderates God’s judgement on Adam, in contrast to unrepentant Cain (and we should note in passing that even there judgement is mitigated). He is also unequivocal that Adam is included within Christ’s salvation.<br /><br />Overall, the gravity of the Fall is tempered down by Irenaeus. It is not act of a man who possesses the full measure of God's character yet somehow rebelling against God's decrees and losing (almost) everything as a result. It is the stumble of a youth faced with their first real test in life whose stumble lands everyone in a dire situation.<br /><br /><br />And through it all, God’s character is primarily one of mercy and patience:<br /><br /><blockquote>This, therefore, was the [object of the] long-suffering of God, that man,passing through all things, and acquiring the knowledge of moral discipline,then attaining to the resurrection from the dead, and learning by experience what is the source of his deliverance, may always live in a state of gratitude to the Lord, having obtained from Him the gift of incorruptibility, that he might love Him the more; for “he to whom more is forgiven, loveth more:” .<em>Against Heresies</em> 4.38.1 </blockquote><br /><br /><strong>Behind the Curtain: Building Blocks of Irenaeus’ ‘Nice Guy’ Theology</strong><br />Behind this is Irenaeus' distinctive view of creation, humanity, and salvation.<br /><br />For Irenaeus 'perfection' can only exist for God. Only God is who he is. God doesn't become more loving, or wise, or good, or just. God just is those things, and is them perfectly or exhaustively or infinitely. God doesn't change.<br /><br />But creatures exist in time. We change, that's what it means for us to be <em>creatures</em>. So, for Irenaeus, we can't really be made fully 'perfect' (we can be perfect in the sense of not being under the reign of satan, but not perfect in the sense of 'no more possibility of moral growth into God's likeness'). Simply by virtue of being creatures we must start out as all humans do, needing to grow in wisdom, stature, and be made perfect (or complete) through the process of living life. It would be fair to say that Irenaeus comes pretty darn close to imposing necessity upon God in this regard:<br /><br /><blockquote>If, however, any one say, “What then? Could not God have exhibited man as perfect from beginning?” let him know that, inasmuch as God is indeed always the same and unbegotten as respects Himself, all things are possible to Him. But created things must be inferior to Him who created them, from the very fact of their later origin; for it was not possible for things recently created to have been uncreated. But inasmuch as they are not uncreated, for this very reason do they come short of the perfect. Because, as these things are of later date, so are they infantile; so are they unaccustomed to, and unexercised in, perfect discipline. For as it certainly is in the power of a mother to give strong food to her infant, [but she does not do so], as the child is not yet able to receive more substantial nourishment; so also it was possible for God Himself to have made man perfect from the first, but man could not receive this [perfection], being as yet an infant.<em>Against Heresies</em> 4.38.1</blockquote><br />‘All things are possible for God’ and yet newly created things can’t be made with experience—that is inherent to what it means to have a starting point. And so Adam wouldn’t have been able to receive perfection (or fullness) from the beginning. God could give it, but Adam couldn’t receive it, so God <em>couldn’t</em> give after all. It’s a sort of Clayton’s necessity upon God. It’s the necessity you have when you don’t have a necessity.<br /><br />Thus, for Irenaeus Adam is set up with a pristine beginning point to undertake the task that God set before him. This task involved growing into maturity by experiencing temptation and overcoming it and so coming to know and embrace the good in a more thorough way than was possible in his naiveté in the beginning, having now encountered evil. In this way, Adam would grow into the image and likeness of God. This in turn was a necessary step in him being able to participate in the life and nature of God and so enter into immortality. He doesn’t start with everything, but he starts with everything he needs to embark upon the task of growing into the image of God:<br /><br /><blockquote>… man making progress day by day, and ascending towards the perfect, that is, approximating to the uncreated One. For the Uncreated is perfect, that is, God. Now it was necessary that man should in the first instance be created; and having been created, should receive growth; and having received growth, should be strengthened; and having been strengthened, should abound; and having abounded, should recover [from the disease of sin]; and having recovered, should be glorified; and being glorified, should see his Lord. For God is He who is yet to be seen, and the beholding of God is productive of immortality, but immortality renders one nigh unto God. .<em>Against Heresies</em> 4.38.3</blockquote><br />Important to this account of humanity’s growing into the likeness of God by living that Irenaeus puts forward is an argument about how we know things. In 4.39.1 of <em>Against Heresies</em> Irenaeus contrasts two ways of knowing, one is by opinion (‘book learning, or being taught by another person), the other is by experience (first hand). He argues that knowledge through experience is better—the lessons are made more thoroughly part of the learner. He observes that that this requires humanity to taste both good and evil so as to more fully know the goodness of good and that evil is ‘disagreeable and nauseous’. Irenaeus goes so far as to claim that ‘…if any one do shun the knowledge of both these kind of things, and the twofold perception of knowledge, he unawares divests himself of the character of a human being.’<br /><br />Again, there is something that rings true at this point. We do learn in a way from experience that does not happen otherwise. Hebrews speaks of Jesus being perfected through his sufferings to be made the perfect High Priest for us. Irenaeus is observing that living in a world where temptation and evil exist is not an unmitigated disaster for us. There is a sense in which God’s project goes forward as we experience and evil, say ‘yuck’ and turn to the good even more wholeheartedly than we did when we were innocent.<br /><br />But again, there’s real problems. Irenaeus’ account suggests that there is a form of necessity that attaches to human sin; God’s plan for salvation includes the experience of sin and then turning away from it through repentance and holding even more firmly to the commands of God as a consequence of practicing wickedness. In Irenaeus’ account it seems as though sin was an absolute necessity (and not just something arising out of God’s predestination). God <em>needed</em> sin. Probably not where we should be going at that point.<br /><br />It also creates problems for our picture of Jesus. If ‘tasting’ evil doesn’t just involve being tempted, but actually doing evil, then his account would seem to leave Jesus either a sinner or not human. Again, Irenaeus’ account has something going for it, but the devil in the details is particularly diabolical.<br /><br />One of the really great things that comes out of Irenaeus’ account is that he sees that there is a <em>good</em> effect from the Fall. As a consequence of human disobedience, humanity learns not to be self-reliant as though humanity has life or strength within itself, and so learns to look to God as the one in whom is everything needed for life and righteousness. In our failure, God is glorified. The sheer glory of God’s strength and grace is shown by his ability to cure us of our sickness:<br /><br /><blockquote>This, therefore, was the [object of the] long-suffering of God, that man…may know himself, how mortal and weak he is; while he also understands respecting God, that He is immortal and powerful to such a degree as to confer immortality upon what is mortal, and eternity upon what is temporal; and may understand also the other attributes of God displayed towards himself, by means of which being instructed he may think of God in accordance with the divine greatness. For the glory of man [is] God, but [His] works [are the glory] of God; and the receptacle of all His wisdom and power [is] man. Just as the physician is proved by his patients, so is God also revealed through men. And therefore Paul declares, “For God hath concluded all in unbelief, that He may have mercy upon all;” <em>Against Heresies</em> 3.20.2</blockquote><br />Only God has life in himself and only God has righteousness and strength in himself. Humanity was made mortal, just like every other creature made in time. Mortality is our nature, death is normal for human beings on their own. But we were destined for eternal life—for something that is beyond our own human nature. We were intended to share in God’s eternal life, to participate in his life, and so be raised to a state beyond what is naturally possible. At this point, Irenaeus is quite different from classical evangelicalism, which would follow Calvin and hold that humanity was made with an immortal soul and so is inherently immortal.<br /><br />As a consequence of Irenaeus’ view, Adam’s failure in the garden is a spur to humility and faith. We couldn’t meet the first challenge we faced! We clearly have none of the resources we need to grow up into the likeness of God and so participate in his eternal life. In light of this the wise person despairs of themselves and looks to God to do for them what they cannot do for themselves—which is the very thing that needs to happen for us to be saved.<br /><br /><blockquote>…man, who had been disobedient to God, and being cast off from immortality, then obtained mercy, receiving through the Son of God that adoption which is [accomplished] by Himself. For he who holds, without pride and boasting, the true glory (opinion) regarding created things and the Creator, who is the Almighty God of all, and who has granted existence to all; [such an one,] continuing in His love and subjection, and giving of thanks, shall also receive from Him the greater glory of promotion, looking forward to the time when he shall become like Him who died for him, for He, too, “was made in the likeness of sinful flesh,” to condemn sin, and to cast it, as now a condemned thing, away beyond the flesh, but that He might call man forth into His own likeness, assigning him as [His own] imitator to God, and imposing on him His Father’s law, in order that he may see God, and granting him power to receive the Father; [being] the Word of God who dwelt in man, and became the Son of man, that He might accustom man to receive God, and God to dwell in man, according to the good pleasure of the Father. <em>Against Heresies</em> 3.20.2</blockquote><br />Christ came, for Irenaeus, to bring this participation about ‘that he might accustom man to receive God and God to dwell in man’. Christ recapitulates Adam’s life, passing through the stages of infancy to adulthood. At each point he triumphs where we failed (and fail again in every descendent of Adam). He then dies, and that death is for Irenaeus both a triumph over Satan and a propitiation.<br /><br />But all of it happens to bring about this transformation—of uniting God and Man so that we share in God’s own properties of Life, Righteousness, and Glory and so are promoted to a position beyond what would be possible for any creature to enjoy otherwise.<br /><br /><strong>Reflection</strong><br />It is a breath taking account. It puts the focus on Jesus Christ front and centre—only he can bring about this union of God and Man through his own incarnation. It highlights the awesome patience and graciousness of God in the face of our sin. It removes any hint of a stingy God toying with people and shines the spotlight fully on God’s purposes to bless humanity beyond what we can naturally take in.<br /><br />The problem is that it has problems, as I’ve briefly indicated in places. And some of these are pretty serious.<br /><br />This is a shame, because everyone likes to be a nice guy. I’d love to take up some of Irenaeus’ concerns—and it may be possible to debug aspects of it here and there. (That’ll sit away in the back of the head over coming years).<br /><br />One thing that is worth keeping in mind in all this, is the context into which Irenaeus wrote.<br /><br />As is apparent from <em>Against Heresies</em> and as I’ve suggested in earlier entries on Gnosticism, there were several movements that had big ethical complaints about Christianity. There were the Gnostics, the Valentinians (who modern scholars <em>also</em> consider Gnostic), and Marcion. All of them had problems with the idea that God made this world and made human beings to live in this world. They couldn’t see human existence in this world as good. And they had problems with God making human beings able to sin, there being temptation in the Garden, and humanity being shut off from the Tree of Life.<br /><br />Overall, their view of the God of creation and of Genesis chapters one to three is of a miserly, begrudging God, who sets traps for his creatures, and makes them to live a blighted existence in time in a material universe, shut out from the glory of eternity.<br /><br />It is the 2nd to 3rd century equivalent of the kind of criticisms made by guys like Dawkins and Pullman—the God of the Bible is immoral.<br /><br />Against this kind of background, Irenaeus’ theological strategy makes sense. He is consecutively taking the rug out from under God’s critics, showing the essentially goodness and graciousness of God’s deeds.<br /><br />Given our context has, I suggest, similarities, some of Irenaeus’ strategy may be of use in our day as well.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-42169001777252296492007-10-21T16:03:00.000-07:002007-10-23T02:56:24.883-07:00Human, all too humanOne of the issues that I have been wrestling with over the last few years as a consequence of my teaching on the doctrine of humanity and my study in Athanasius is the relationship between human beings generally in the image of God and Jesus Christ as the image of God.<br /><br /><strong>The Issue</strong><br />In Genesis, in making humanity, God says:<br /><br /><blockquote>Genesis 1:26-27 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." God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.</blockquote>This passage, as people generally know, has had a significant effect on Christian thinking about what the Bible teaches about what it means to be human. And it is common among Evangelicals to try and understand ‘image’ as something self-contained, something humans have as a completed thing at the point of creation (the big contenders being reason, the ability to enter into relationships, or dominion as to what the image is that we had). It is then either lost or impaired when Adam breaks the command.<br /><br />But when we get to the NT we find that Christ is also described as the image of God:<br /><br /><blockquote>2 Corinthians 4:4 in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.</blockquote><br /><blockquote>Colossians 1:15-16 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities-- all things have been created through Him and for Him.</blockquote><br /><blockquote>Hebrews 1:3 And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power. When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,</blockquote><br />This then creates an issue. Is Christ the image of God simply because he became a man, and took on the image of God in the Incarnation? (Calvin's view, below) This seems difficult to square with the context of how it is used in the verses above, where ‘image’ is being used in a context that suggests Christ’s divinity.<br /><br />Or is it that there are two images? We are the image in one way (human), and Christ is the image another way (divine)? This seems to multiply images needlessly (not a good idea, in light of the prohibition on making images—small joke there…). It also suggests that the Lord Jesus is two images of God, one as man and one as the Son of God. That seems a bit clumsy.<br /><br />A further issue is that ‘image’ is used as a salvation category in the NT. It is one of the ways in which the Bible speaks of what it means for us to be saved:<br /><br /><blockquote>Romans 8:29 For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren;</blockquote>Now, normally, Evangelicals understand verses like this in terms of moral transformation—we become godly. However, something more seems on view in passages like the following:<br /><br /><blockquote>1 Corinthians 15:47-49 The first man is from the earth, earthy; the second man is from heaven. As is the earthy, so also are those who are earthy; and as is the heavenly, so also are those who are heavenly. Just as we have borne the image of the earthy, we will also bear the image of the heavenly.</blockquote><br />In the argument of 1 Corinthians 15 this issue of the bearing the image of the man from heaven cannot be simply an ethical similarity. It is more ontological, It is part of the logic that moves us to the very next verse:<br /><br /><blockquote>1 Corinthians 15:50 Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.</blockquote><br />It is a statement that the resurrection is more than resuscitation, it is a transformation. A transformation of the human from an earthy human made from soil to a heavenly human who is a life giving spirit.<br /><br />In terms of the general approach to anthropology that sees ‘image’ as something finished at creation and self-contained this strand of eschatology in 1 Cor 15 seems a bit out of place. It seems almost as though we aren’t going to be really human in the End.<br /><br />However, one of the things I’ve noticed is that a number of the early church fathers understood image quite differently. At first I thought it was just Athanasius, but then I discovered it in Irenaeus so I thought it was just Eastern. But now I’ve seen it in Tertullian (along with Augustine often considered to have founded Western Christianity, which Evangelicalism descends from) as well.<br /><br />From Tertullian’s work <em>Against Praxeus </em>(Praxeus was an early teacher of Sabellianism or Monarchical Modalism—the idea that ‘Father’ ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’ are not three Persons who exist simultaneously but three roles or names or modes of God’s activity):<br /><br /><blockquote>In the following text also He distinguishes among the Persons: “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God created He him.” Why say “image of God?” Why not “His own image” merely, if He was only one who was the Maker, and if there was not also One in whose image He made man? But there was One in whose image God was making man, that is to say, Christ’s image, who, being one day about to become Man (more surely and more truly so), had already caused the man to be called His image, who was then going to be formed of clay—the image and similitude of the true and perfect Man.<em>Against Praxeus </em>XII</blockquote><br />The idea here envisages a more open-ended content to the statement ‘let us make man in our image’. Whereas the first view above sees that statement as being fulfilled when Adam is created, this view doesn’t see that God has really made humanity into the image of God until Christ’s death and resurrection. That is, image of God looks forward all the way to our union with Christ by the Spirit. It is something that is brought about by the work of Christ, not simply when God fashions Adam from the dust and breathes into him.<br /><br /><strong>An Evaluation:</strong><br /><em>I find this idea very attractive, far more so than its alternative, for the following reasons:</em><br /><br />o It is more inherently Trinitarian (as Tertullian brings out in the quote above), understanding Image of God in terms of how it is used in the NT—to designate the second member of the Godhead, rather than a more monistic sense of ‘like the divine nature’ which the first view tends towards.<br /><br />o It is more inherently Christ-centred—drawing a strong link between humanity’s image and Christ’s Image, and making the latter the grounds for the former. Human beings are those creatures God made to be transformed by being united to his Son.<br /><br />o It also unites who Christ is and what he’s done more fully. Our being conformed to the image of Christ arises out of who he is as the Image of the Father. ‘Image making’ is part of his work, because Image is part of who he is.<br /><br />o It better captures the strand of teaching in the Bible that indicates that humanity’s final state will be more glorious than Adam’s was in the beginning. The picture in the final chapters of Revelation, 1 John’s statement that we will be like God, Peter’s statement that we are to be sharers in the divine nature, the motif that Christ has become head of creation, the statement that at the End ‘God will be all in all’ and 1 Cor 15’s picture of a spiritual body that is not ‘flesh and blood’ all point to redemption doing something more than undo sin and return us to creation. It suggests that Eden has nothing on what’s in store. A view of the Image that is likewise open-ended, where Adam’s humanity is the start and not the final word seems to mesh with this strand of the Bible’s teaching on salvation and eschatology. I certainly prefer it to Calvin’s approach which seems to suggest that redemption is basically designed to restore the image we had in Adam:<br /><br /><blockquote>But our definition of the image seems not to be complete until it appears more clearly what the faculties are in which man excels, and in which he is to be regarded as a mirror of the divine glory. This, however, cannot be better known than from the remedy provided for the corruption of nature. It cannot be doubted that when Adam lost his first estate he became alienated from God. Wherefore, although we grant that the image of God was not utterly effaced and destroyed in him, it was, however, so corrupted, that any thing which remains is fearful deformity; and, therefore, our deliverance begins with that renovation which we obtain from Christ, who is, therefore, called the second Adam, because he restores us to true and substantial integrity.<em>Institutes</em> 1.XIV.4</blockquote><br /><br />While I like this approach because it also seeks to understand what Image is in light of Christ—we understand the Image from its restoration, if one reads Book 1, chapter 14 of the <em>Institutes</em>, I think one will get the impression that Calvin doesn’t carry that project through in a thorough going fashion. He takes a few short cuts to get to his view that image is the rational soul and our moral likeness to God and that Christ restores it after sin’s ravages.<br /><br />This identification of Image with a Platonic rational soul (and Calvin is quite clear in 1.XIV.6 that Plato had something worth saying about the soul) leads him to classify angels as being in the image of God too (without any Scriptural warrant). The only place he sees salvation as possibly taking us higher than where we began, he sees becoming like the angels, rather than being conformed to the Son of God as our destiny:<br /><br /><blockquote>But it cannot be denied that the angels also were created in the likeness of God, since, as Christ declares (Mt. 22:30), our highest perfection will consist in being like them.<em>Institutes</em> 1.XIV.2</blockquote><br /><br />In short, I think the view of Athanasius (et. al.) captures the Bible’s teaching much better than the more Augustinian/Calvin view that dominates Evangelicalism—and it makes sense of parts of the Bible that I think tend to be passed over a bit (those things I highlighted above).<br /><br /><em>The main problems with it seem to be:</em><br />1. That it suggests that Christ’s role as mediator precedes sin. Either it means that Christ would have been Incarnate even if sin hadn’t occurred (a view that Irenaeus seems to imply, if not state outright)—which as Calvin points out is to go beyond Scripture as the only Christ we are given is he who came to deal with sin. Or it means a more supralapsarian position—that salvation was decreed ‘first’ and is the reason and cause for sin being ordained by God. This also, in my view, falls under Calvin’s prohibition—it seeks to enter into God’s predestining will at a point where God has not disclosed it.<br /><br />That suggests that this is a bit of a problem for the 'Athanasius' view that needs to be watched, and is going to continually encourage people to start to speculate on things there is no revelation about. However, Col 1: makes it clear that creation exists for Christ:<br /><blockquote>Colossians 1:16 all things have been created through Him and for Him.</blockquote>So there is something very fitting about Christ being the head of creation, and the bridegroom of the Church—such relationships mesh well with the fact that creation was made for him.<br /><br />2. Calvin clearly rejects the idea in the <em>Institutes</em>:<br /><br /><blockquote>There is more plausibility in the imagination of those who interpret that Adam was created in the image of God, because it was conformable to Christ, who is the only image of God; but not even for this is there any solid foundation.<em>Institutes</em> 1.XIV.3</blockquote><br />In characteristic style, he doesn’t trouble with anything so trivial as a <em>reason</em> for rejecting this non-Augustinian view of a good chunk of the early church. Despite my great respect for Calvin, an assertion without evidence is hard to accept.<br /><br />3. 'Let us make man in our Image' couldn’t have meant ‘let us make man to become like Christ’ to its original readers. This doesn’t seem that strong to me. If God’s words here are a form of prophecy, then they couldn’t be clearly understood until they had been fulfilled—that’s just part of the nature of much of Biblical prophecy.<br /><br />All in all, these don’t seem sufficient to prefer the more classical reason/dominion/relationship understanding.<br /><br /><strong>Summary</strong><br />I think we were made in the Image because God made this universe for his Son, and made us to be conformed to the likeness of his Son. Being conformed to the image of Christ is both the fulfillment of our creation and the overturning of sin’s attempt to destroy God’s good creation.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-63424523946376741752007-10-21T08:49:00.000-07:002007-10-24T08:49:53.038-07:00Why is There Anything At All?One of the great moves forward in my understanding of God as a result of my studies at Moore was grasping that God's works are an expression of who he is. I came to College with a view that I think many Evangelicals have, one where all of God's acts are understood basically just against God's will. God does what he does because he chooses to, and that's really all you can say. <br /><br />The problem with this is that it makes God's actions very impersonal. God's actions tell you something about his <em>power</em>, because he is able to do what he does. But the actions don't really reveal anything of who God is, they don't express his <em>nature</em>. In a sense God hides behind his actions - we see what he does, we never know how much of him is really in those things he does. And so there's a bit of a gap between who God is and what God does. And I think I've observed a number of places in Christian thought where one can see this gulf lurking.<br /><br />One of the things that happened at College was the beginning of a process that has continued with my Trinitarian studies where I have begun to see that God does what he does because of who he is. He doesn't make the world and give life to all living just because he is omnipotent and chooses to. He is Life, all life is an overflow, or expression, of his nature as Life. He enlightens every human being, not just because he has power in the abstract, but because he is the Light.<br /><br />Hence, when we come to God saving us through his Son, it is not just the case that God could and made a choice. (You can see the old problem get raised when people ask the question, but if God can do anything why couldn't he just forgive people without Jesus dying? It is playing God's power off against his nature. He doesn't just do things, he does things in a way that is fitting for his nature. And it is fitting for the Father to forgive through his Son.) <br /><br />No, God saves because he is, at his heart, Saviour. He is the God who saves. It's not just what he's done, it is who he is. When God saves us, it isn't an act of abstract power by an arbitrary will at arms length from the eternal God's own interior life. God's saving work is grounded in God's very nature.<br /><br />Now, different theologians have stated these ideas with varying degrees of clarity, qualification, and thoughtfulness. But I think the prize for sheer boldness has to go to Irenaeus. Completely ignoring any issue of imposing necessity upon God, and removing any freedom from God's actions, Irenaeus answers the question as to why God made the world:<br /><br /><blockquote>For inasmuch as He [Christ Jesus] had a pre-existence as a saving Being, it was necessary that what might be saved should also be called into existence, in order that the Being who saves should not exist in vain. <em>Against Heresies </em>3.22.3 </blockquote><br /><br />Why is there anything at all? So there would be something for Christ to save. If there wasn't anything to save he wouldn't have had a reason for his eternal existence. Christ Jesus is <em>that</em> much of a Saviour.<br /><br />Plus several hundred points for grasping how much the Lord Jesus' salvation is grounded in his nature as the Saviour, Irenaeus.<br /><br />Minus several thousand for making creation necessary for God.<br /><br />That's actually not too bad a score for theologians...Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-17719160974450758192007-10-11T01:50:00.000-07:002007-10-23T02:52:23.299-07:00Gnosticism and Speaking of GodIrenaeus in his work <em>Against Heresies </em>spends a fair bit of space detailing the intricacies of various Gnostic theologies. His stated reason is that just to describe these views rebuts them for most people, they are that outlandish.<br /><br />He’s got a point, reading <em>Apocryphon</em> and some summaries of a few other Gnostic works reminded me of a mix of the most bizarre elements of Mormonism and Scientology.<br /><br />However, for the person whose mind takes paths less travelled I could imagine that Gnosticism would offer something substantial. These aren’t the writings of idiots. They are thoughtful and evocative attempts to explain everything from God down and shed light on human experience of life. They have the ability to capture the imagination and stimulate religious feelings (apparently there exists a body of Gnostic poetry that is in places quite moving).<br /><br />It reminds me again that evaluations such as deep and shallow, thoughtful and sentimental, evocative and prosaic, creative and pedestrian can only be, at best, penultimate.<br /><br />It is never good for talk about God to be shallow, sentimental, prosaic or pedestrian. No matter what the content of such speech is, that kind of form denies the reality of God. But I’m not sure that the answer is to try and be deep, thoughtful, evocative, and creative—as though the answer is found just in pursuing the opposite set of qualities. One can be deep etc. and still offer something false in root and branch. Shallow truth is better than deep error when serving the Church. (I’m not sure it works quite the same way in Academia, but that’s a thought for another post.)<br /><br />But ultimately, the real answer is to be found in aiming to have what you say reflect who God is in both its form and its content. It is not a silver bullet, there’s no magic mechanical three step plan there that stops you from becoming inane or error-filled. But God doesn’t submit himself to human control. If we are given the grace to speak rightly of God, then that is his gift. While God is free to give such a gift to whoever he wants, there is a regular call to humility. And in a sense aiming to have what you say reflect who God is is just another way of saying, speak with humility. True humility is the basis for knowledge of God. Humility and faith are interwoven.<br /><br /><blockquote><p>James 4:6 But He gives a greater grace. Therefore it says, "God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble."</p></blockquote>Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-36993537532788070012007-10-10T06:23:00.000-07:002007-10-10T06:36:48.099-07:00Scriptural InterpretationOne of the more disturbing features of Gnosticism for me (out of quite a large menu to choose from) is its approach to characters in the Biblical Scriptures. Because it identifies this world as in some way bad, Gnosticism regularly reverses the value judgements on things in the Bible. So the creator of the world is bad, and as he is the god of the OT, then most of morality and actions of god in the OT is similarly problematic. Eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a good thing, eating from the tree of life a bad thing. In the <em>Apocryphon of John</em>, the character of Jesus claims that he was the one who enticed Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit for their salvation. Some Gnostic groups considered Cain to be a good guy, and even that the snake in the Garden was an agent for the true God.<br /><br />The thing that’s provocative about this is that the climate of ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ has a very similar outcome. It begins with the observation that the biblical writers had an agenda, and so wrote the accounts in such a way as to lead the reader to take on the account’s view of the events that it narrates. Then it suggests that this serves the interests of the powerful—those who wrote the text. At this point it goes quintessentially Australian and backs the underdog, reinterpreting the text in favour of the marginalised figures—the silent women, the silent Canaanites, the silent Judas and the like. It makes them the hero of the story and so unmasks the immoral stance of the author.<br /><br />This doesn’t mean that contemporary heremeneutics are Gnostic. Rather, it suggests the point that Peter makes in his epistle:<br /><br /><blockquote><p>2 Peter 3:15-16 just as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, 16 as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction. </p></blockquote><br />The point is that interpretation is a moral issue. Words must be interpreted, even as they seek to interpret the world to the hearer or reader. It is not uncommon to hear the argument at present that issue X (whatever is being contested) ‘is not a question about the authority of Scripture/being an Evangelical/being a Christian (etc) but is simply a question about interpretation.’ It’s sentimental, and it’s nonsense. Words are used to communicate, so interpretation is a moral issue because it involves the way you treat another person—the person who spoke or wrote.<br /><br />And when the words are Scripture, then questions of interpretation are automatically questions about the authority of Scripture, or of what it means to be someone who lives in the light of Scripture. The Gnostics showed their rebellion against God by their attempt to deny that he made the world, despite the fact that it presented itself as an attempt to preserve God’s goodness. In a similar way, we can reject someone and what they are saying just as much by beating our chests about how seriously we are treating their words as by openly spurning their words. We have to interpret, but in interpreting the word, we are judged by that word. Our fundamental orientation to the word is made manifest.<br /><br />Part of the reason for this is the nature of Scripture. It is an intrinsically moral word—it is a word that makes absolute demands upon its hearer. This is why the word of God can be so hard to understand, why it often seems that understanding it involves so much work. It is not because it is obscure, it is because one cannot truly hear this kind of word in a detached or dispassionate way. Form and content have to come together. The way we listen has to reflect the nature of the word that is being spoken. And the word that is being spoken is unlike any other word we could hear, it is the word that created the world, that sets the boundaries for life, that judges, that sheds the light of Christ in our hearts. This word demands more of us then any word we could speak to each other, just to hear it properly.<br /><br /><blockquote><p>James 1:21-22 21 Therefore putting aside all filthiness and all that remains of wickedness, in humility receive the word implanted, which is able to save your souls. 22 But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves.</p></blockquote>Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-18847702233521269952007-10-10T03:38:00.000-07:002007-10-10T03:46:24.116-07:00Gnosticism and the Problem of EvilI have been increasingly thinking for a while now that the obsession with evil and suffering in the world—and the increasing tendency of atheists to raise the problem of evil and suffering as an argument against God’s existence-is a very modern phenomena. I have tended to think that it reflects just how comfortable contemporary western life is. Only people who have gotten to the point where they think that life really should be easy, safe, and free of any real problems would be so thrown by the existence of these features of life. Western complaints of suffering in the world feels like the complaints of an over-indulged young twenties adult ‘Who’ll just die because the boss won’t let me listen to the radio while serving customers.’<br /><br />However, Gnosticism is nothing if it’s not an attempt to try and solve the problem of the existence of evil. So, while I still think there’s something in the ‘Get over yourself’ response to contemporary histrionics about the existence of suffering and evil, it does seem as though people began asking the question soon after the gospel was proclaimed. This suggests that the problem may be more basic to human responses to the knowledge of God than I had thought.<br /><br />Unfortunately, like all attempts to find an answer Gnosticism is problematic. Ultimately the Bible doesn’t explain where evil comes from or how it began. It is a mystery—one of those things God hasn’t revealed, that we don’t have the resources to discover without revelation.<br /><br />Gnosticism’s solution has the problem that it turns us into victims, rather than criminals. Evil and suffering exists because of the moral irregularities of beings further up the ontological tree (the Demi-Urge who made the world and is the god of the OT and his mother, Sophia). We aren’t responsible, and neither is God.<br /><br />The problem is two-fold. We don’t see ourselves correctly and so don’t see that forgiveness really is at the heart of the solution to the human condition.<br /><br />But arguably just as bad is that this desire to keep God’s hands clean can only be done by distancing him from the world in which evil and suffering exist. Gnosticism is a fairly strong example—it preserves God’s utter purity by putting multiple ontological layers of beings between God and the world and having the world alien to God’s love (an excellent insight by my supervisor—Gnosticism’s difference with Christianity is that Gnosticism makes the world alien to the love of God). But the desire to absolve God of the problem of evil regularly involves reducing his Lordship over the world, and involvement with it.<br /><br />The Bible is less squeamish, and more robust. God makes no apologies for the existence of evil and suffering, is regularly pictured as using them for his good purposes, and is unequivocal that he is good and righteous. The book of Job makes it clear that God is not interested in coming down to our level and giving us the evidence we need to pass judgement on him—that he sees even our desire to answer the problem of evil as itself part of the problem of evil. God is God. He is to be worshipped, glorified, thanked, and served. He’s not to be vindicated or condemned. You don’t judge the Judge, even to declare him righteous.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-46920704192780936722007-10-10T03:37:00.000-07:002007-10-10T03:38:36.487-07:00GnosticismSubmitted my first paper and talked it over with my supervisor yesterday. It was on Gnosticism and whether ‘Gnosticism’ is the name of a coherent alternative to Christianity. It was not an area I would have picked out for myself, but I’m glad I looked into it a bit more—I had gotten the impression that Gnosticism was a movement that began outside of the Christian Church, and it now seems fairly clear that that wasn’t the case. Gnosticism began as a heresy and continued as such for most (if not all) of its existence.<br /><br />One of the real benefits was taking the time to read what is generally thought to be the most influential Gnostic text: <em>The Apocryphon of John</em>, a post-resurrection conversation between the apostle John and Jesus, where Jesus settles John’s uncertainties by engaging in a series of long soliloquies that unpack a Gnostic understanding of the beginning of Life, the Universe, and Everything, as well as the nature of salvation. Several things struck me as a consequence of the research.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1481633930458110395.post-78515394776230591182007-09-29T13:57:00.000-07:002007-09-29T14:00:24.754-07:00Reflections on International Travel and Duty Free ShoppingThe trip from Australia to England was my first international flight since childhood. It was easier than I expected, there was substantially more leg room than I am used to in domestic flights, so I was able to move my legs around enough to try and keep the dreaded DVT away (the doctors’ have warned me that if I get a second one I’ll probably be on rat poison for the rest of my life—which I can’t say features all that highly in my preferred futures). However, the thing that struck me most was the Duty Free Shopping. I had had some sense that this was a feature of international travel, and, given our limited budget for the next few years, was hoping to acquire some small advantage through some careful Duty Free purchases. <br /><br />It was a bit of a fizzle. For the most part Duty Free (in Sydney, Bangkok, and Heathrow) seemed to focus on four main areas: alcohol, chocolate, make up, and perfumes (and tobacco, but I’m less knowledgeable about that). The savings in these areas did seem to be everything people had made them out to be. However, other areas with a bit more ‘substance’ to them, such as electronics, seemed to offer only nominal savings. Thus, the Duty Free shopping that is part of the international travel package seems to cater to those shoppers who are interested in purchasing luxuries. If you’re looking for basics: groceries, semi-permanent items to set up one’s home, and the like, then there’s no real Duty Free savings (or even market from what I could see) there for you. <br /><br />Now, I suspect that there might be a set of good economic reasons why things work this way—governments probably tax these areas far more highly than other areas (luxury taxes and so forth), and no doubt there’s some good legal/economic reason why an item bought in one country for personal use in another country avoids taxes in both countries. Nonetheless, something about this system of giving those already wealthy enough to indulge in international travel tax breaks on their indulgences seems a bit misguided. <br /><br />Such sentiments could just be my inherited sense of ‘fair play’ and soft commitment to a social welfare state that my parents bequeathed me. However, at least part of my concern comes from a strand of Scriptures that sit uneasily with such phenomenal discounting of luxuries:<br /><br />James 5:5 You have lived luxuriously on the earth and led a life of wanton pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. (NASB)<br /><br />Revelation 18:11-18 11 "And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn over her, because no one buys their cargoes any more; 12 cargoes of gold and silver and precious stones and pearls and fine linen and purple and silk and scarlet, and every kind of citron wood and every article of ivory and every article made from very costly wood and bronze and iron and marble, 13 and cinnamon and spice and incense and perfume and frankincense and wine and olive oil and fine flour and wheat and cattle and sheep, and cargoes of horses and chariots and slaves and human lives. 14 "And the fruit you long for has gone from you, and all things that were luxurious and splendid have passed away from you and men will no longer find them. 15 "The merchants of these things, who became rich from her, will stand at a distance because of the fear of her torment, weeping and mourning, 16 saying, 'Woe, woe, the great city, she who was clothed in fine linen and purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls; 17 for in one hour such great wealth has been laid waste!' And every shipmaster and every passenger and sailor, and as many as make their living by the sea, stood at a distance, 18 and were crying out as they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, 'What city is like the great city?' (NASB)<br /><br />Both these passages are statements of eschatological judgement upon the wealthy. In both cases one of the reasons highlighted for the coming judgement is the way in which the life of the (typical) rich is given over to enjoying their wealth, to trying to maximise their pleasure by filling their life with luxury. The Bible seems fairly open eyed that a significant amount of trade revolves around the luxuries market, not so much the buying and selling of necessities. <br /><br />Now, I’m hardly an aesthete. I enjoy nice music, computer games, dvds, good food, alcohol (in fairly small and very occasional doses, nothing like the standard drink per day that is the current medical wisdom for extending one’s life), most of the kinds of things that one would associate with a Western Gen Xer. I think God gave us the world and everything in it so that we would receive it with thanksgiving, and obtain enjoyment from its use—that’s just part of God’s goodness and generosity to the human race. <br /><br />Nonetheless, as well as the Bible’s warnings against greed, which I regularly hear acknowledged, there also seems to be this extra note of judgement on luxurious living, on living for pleasure, and sensate pleasure in particular. I really don’t know what the parameters of this principle are, and I’m sure there would be those who think I am also in breach of these Scriptures. (In my experience people are considered to be guilty of greed or overweening luxury if they have a bit more than the person making the judgement, or a bit more than what the judge aspires to). <br /><br />Even with those caveats, I still think there’s a fairly blatant disconnect between the Bible’s judgement and this economic structure. If the Bible’s strictures against luxurious living mean anything, they would go against giving the ‘leisure classes’ big discounts on luxury items. So, I think I am in principle opposed to Duty Free shopping.Baddelimhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00401080005530162767noreply@blogger.com3