Re: appendix

I agree that the personification in verses 19 and 22 suggest that ktisis is most likely referring to people. I also think, given the context, that it is specifically referring to Old Testament Saints.
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Michael Roberts
  To: jack syme ; George Murphy ; asa@calvin.edu ; Steven M Smith
  Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 5:58 PM
  Subject: Re: appendix

  The question is what does ktisis mean in these verses, where it is translated asCREATION, elsewhere the word clearly means humanity eg Col 1;23 Mk 16;15. Often it means creation but we must see the context.

  I do ask whether the aphids and quartz crystals wait in eager expectation as in vs 19. and whether mosquitoes and Martians will be brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

  Michael

   From: jack syme
    To: George Murphy ; asa@calvin.edu ; Steven M Smith
    Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 5:19 PM
    Subject: Re: appendix

    I think this view, that creation is "broken" as a result of the Fall, is often due to an erroneous interpretation of Romans 8:19-22

    19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that[i] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

    22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
      ----- Original Message -----
      From: George Murphy
      To: asa@calvin.edu ; Steven M Smith
      Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 11:05 AM
      Subject: appendix

      In my earlier post I responded too quickly to the excerpt below. But on reading the full article I find that the argument that Mr. Hart makes is still far from satisfactory. E.g., he says:

          "Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to "powers" and "principalities"--spiritual and terrestrial--alien to God."

          As applied to the present question, this seems to suggest that the geophysical processes which gave rise to the tsunamis are the result of some primordial sin (whether identified with a literal interpretation of Gen.3 or not) rather than of the fundamental interactions & their laws which God created in the beginning. Such a argument is highly problematic. It is "insufferably fabulous" not only to non-Christians but to a lot of Christians.

          A more serious problem is that while Hart refers to the Incarnation, he makes no reference to the cross as God's participation in the suffering of the world. While that doesn't provide a neat solution to the theodicy question, I'm convinced that anything said about the problem of suffering that doesn't appeal to the cross is worth little.

      Shalom
      George
      http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
        ----- Original Message -----
        From: Steven M Smith
        To: asa@calvin.edu
        Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 10:13 AM
        Subject: What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami?

        Here is an interesting article from the Opinion Journal in the WashPost On-line:
        Link: http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110006097

        Tremors of Doubt
        What kind of God would allow a deadly tsunami?

        Quote from article ... "When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days."

        _____________
        Steven M. Smith, Geologist, U.S. Geological Survey
        Box 25046, M.S. 973, DFC, Denver, CO 80225
        Office: (303)236-1192, Fax: (303)236-3200
        Email: smsmith@usgs.gov
        -USGS Nat'l Geochem. Database NURE HSSR Web Site-
         http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1997/ofr-97-0492/
Received on Mon Jan 3 18:27:34 2005