Re: [asa] Slug

Could I just add to this that just because Gen Ch 1 doesn't conform to what
we understand as Hebrew poetry (as, for example in the Psalms) with
parallelism etc, does not mean that it needs to be taken as "history".

Glenn, I think you rather missed the point of my Wilfred Owen poem
illustration by dismissing it as "a poem", the implication being that you
can get away with porkies in a poem, but if it's not a poem then it's
history and you must tell the truth. But we can use metaphors that are, in
the literal sense, completely untrue and they don't have to be in a poem.
Modern business jargon is over-full of quasi-technical metaphors that aren't
literally true, but business presentations aren't poetic. Or what about the
description of someone who is good at gardening as "having green fingers"?
That's not a poem either, but I've never seen anyone with literally green
fingers! So it's irrelevant that the Owen is a poem, and the Genesis Ch 1
isn't literally a poem - it's poetic without being verse. Owen's statement
"woke once the clays of a cold star" carries so much meaning in the context
- the warm body of the newly dead soldier is going to go cold, and the sun,
the origin of life, can do nothing to stop this happening. If we start
insisting that the statements about the origin of life have to be
scientifically accurate (or at least not inaccurate), then we lose the point
of what is being said.

As far as the flood narrative not reading like a poem, it is nonetheless an
elaborate Chiastic literary form that is analysed in detail, for example at
http://www.grisda.org/origins/06008.htm . The centre point of the chiasm is
God's remembrance of Noah in the middle of the storm, and the sequence of
the narrative, with its concentric parallels around this central point, is
to emphasise the really important fact in the middle. It seems this is a
deliberate literary construction which we miss if we just say it's a
historical narrative that is in fact wrong.

To understand these early chapters of Genesis, we need perhaps to become
more familiar with the literary devices of the time, that would have been
readily appreciated by the readers, and their symbolism and purpose would
have been apparent. To say "it's not a poem (verse) and therefore it must
be history" is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You seem to be
fond of accusing everyone else on here of thinking like a YEC. I think YOU
are thinking like a YEC here. I've heard many a YEC say Genesis 1 is
history because it's not a poem. I say it is a poem, but not one in verse.
Like a "prose poem", of which there are many modern examples, notably by
Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Iain

On 6/16/06, Michael Roberts <michael.andrea.r@ukonline.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Michael Roberts has memorably described Genesis Ch 1 as a "Hymn to
> Creation", and I think if one views it as that, and quit worrying about
> whether what it conveys are accurate facts, then perhaps you can get it
> "straight in the guts" just as that Wilfred Owen poem with all its
> scientific absurdities gets me in the guts.
>
> Iain
>
>
> I do not have the oriiginal thought to describe Gen1 as a poem. I took
> that from Gilbert Rorison's chapter on Genesis in Samuel Wilberforce,s
> "Answers to Essays and Reviews" in 1861. That book was a selection of essays
> by conservatives opposing the liberal theology of "Essays and Reviews".
> Clearly for Wilberforce, despite his anti- darwinism and conservatism
> Rosison's view was not radical or liberal.
>
> After all most theologians had stopped this detailed tie-up of Genesis and
> science by about 1700, and most early 19th century concordist approachs were
> far more generalised and non-specific than Glenn wants to be.
>
> I am sorry Glenn there can be little engagement with your ideas as you
> seem to dismiss all others especially those you charge with metaphoricalism
> and accommodation.
>
> Michael
>
>
>
>

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