Cross & ID

Bundling several response:

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Bill Hamilton wrote -

> --- George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com> wrote:
>
> (snip)
> OTOH the message of the cross, that God & God's saving work
>> are revealed under the form of their opposite suggests that God's action in
>> the world should be hidden.
>>
> I'm glad to see you're spending _some_ time on the list, George. By "opposite"
> above do you mean death?
>
> I'd like to see you expand on this theme. I think I see what you're driving at,
> but I and perhaps others could benefit by a few more words.

Suffering & death are part of it, for our normal human concepts won't allow God to be touched by such things. God makes us righteous through one who is decalred unrighteous. ("God made him to be sin who knew no sin.") The one who is forsaken by God is God, whose revealation takes place in the apparent absence of God.
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Mervin Bitkofer wrote -

>George Murphy wrote:
>David -

>3d, grant for the sake of argument that we can know God from natural phenomena apart from faith. Those phenomena must be ones that Paul & his >readers in the 1st century Mediterranean world knew about. Needless to say, they knew nothing about the blood clotting cascade or information theory.

>> Are you suggesting that there is (or should be) some fundamental difference in our natural theology today because we understand these things and they didn't? >> Your other points which I didn't include above, made it clear that natural theology by itself is incomplete and even dangerous. That assessment seems sound >> enough. But regarding natural theology such as it is, I have trouble seeing any distinction between earlier epochs and ours. We are further along a >>technological road, and so we have a different horizon of the unknown in view. They weren't as far along and so their mysteries, like ours, were just in front of >> them. The 'God of the Gaps' straw man has always posited something that Christian/Hebrew thinking should never grant (has it ever?): that God is limited to >> our gaps in knowledge. Meanwhile if some find the gaps, whatever they be relative to this epoch or that, to be a stimulus for praise, more power to them! If >> new psalms were written by Spirit-filled people today, they would no doubt incorporate our current horizons of knowledge and the veiled mysteries just >>beyond. Whether or not we anticipate learning more about those things so as to retract their status as "mysterious" should be entirely irrelevant. God is a God >> of all truth, understood or not, right?

My point was simply that Paul can't have had in mind any of the things that current ID people point to. It must have been something much more basic. & if such basic phenomena that were known 2000 years ago doesn't serve to prove the existence of a creator then maybe the whole argument is off track. & I think it is because, as I said, Paul's argument is solely that "they are without excuse."

It's one thing to say that we should praise God for the wonders of the bacterial flagellum even though we don't understand how they've come to be. It's quite another thing to say that we should praise God because we don't understand how they've come to be.

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David Opderbeck wrote -

> George, I'll have to read your links when I have time. However, it strikes me initially that you're taking a very strongly Calvinistic stance on faith and >knowledge. Is that right? I would take a more moderated stance on the the first chapters of Romans, to say the people do in fact know of God through general > revelation, but that they willfully refuse to obey him. I'm not a fideist a la Van Til. Is that the framework from which you're operating?

I am not a Calvinist at all but a Lutheran & have never read van Til. The main Reformed influences on my theology have been Barth, Torrance & Moltmann. The 1st 2 have been helpful in developing the type of critique of independent natural theology to which I referred, while the last has furthered my understanding of a theology of the Crucified. But Luther & the Lutherans Bonhoeffer & Juengel have been the primary influences. My book The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross (Trinity Press International, 2003) sets out my approach in greater detail.

I certainly think that theology is fides quaerens intellectum but I wouldn't classify that as "fideism."

In what sense do Steven Weinberg or Richard Dawkins "in fact know of God through general revelation" but then "willfully refuse to obey them"? Of course I think that their anti-religious views are quite wrong, but have enough respect for their intellectual integrity that I can't convince myself that in any conscious way they know that there is a God. If there is such a knowledge of God it - & its repression - must be deeply subconscious. Or is it possible - this idea has just occurred to me recently & I haven't checked it thoroughly - that Paul's language in vv.21-23 refers to the distant past? I.e., is he possibly talking here about the first humans getting off track, the beginning of a process which would result in ignorance of the true God by the whole human race?

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
Received on Mon Jan 2 16:13:52 2006