I have addressed these issues in other places. That doesn't mean that what I've said is beyond debate, or that further discussion & detaiul would be worthwhile. But what I tried to set out in my opening post of this thread was a sketch of the whole story of creation as presented in scripture, one which doesn not involve an initial golden age but is in fact a story that moves from beginning to end. It is, moreover, a story which is broadly consistent with the scientific picture of the world. & far from least, it's a story in which the Incarnation plays a central role & is not simply a deus ex machina to solve the problem of sin. Our hermeneutic needs to be genuinely christological.
David, you seem to be attached by some type of elastic band to a conservative view of scripture and hermeneutics. You can move a bit & give serious consideration to accomodation & an incarnational understanding of scripture, try to face scientific realities seriously - & then you come to a point where it goes "sproing" & you're back at the same old same old. New wine has to go in new wineskins. L'audace, l'ausace, toujours l'audace,
I'll be away for a few days so may not be able to contribute.
Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Opderbeck" <dopderbeck@gmail.com>
To: "George Murphy" <gmurphy@raex.com>
Cc: <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 9:13 PM
Subject: Re: Golden Age (was Re: [asa] Humanity and the Fall: Questions and a Survey)
> George said: It may have been that the first humans in a theological
> sense, & the first to sin, were a single couple but ther genetic
> evidence seems against it.
>
> I respond: I don't see why this is so, if "in a theological sense" is
> meant to distinguish the merely biological sense. The genetic
> evidence is against the allelic diversity in the human genome arising
> from a single couple earlier than millions of years ago. But it seems
> to me that this says nothing at all about whether the first humans "in
> a theological sense" could have been a single pair.
>
> George said: [the location of paradise] has no theological significance.
>
> I respond: But, there is theological significance to the fact that
> the Bible describes the garden as apparently a specific place in
> Mesopotamia if their either was no such garden or it wasn't in
> Mesopotamia. This implicates our doctrine of scripture and our
> hermeneutics -- for those of us from conservative evangelical
> traditions, two very key theological issues we have to wrestle with.
> Because it implicates our doctrine of scripture and our hermeneutics,
> it also implicates our epistemology -- what specifically can we know
> of God and how can we know it.
>
> If there was no Edenic pre-fall state for humans at all, this also has
> deep theological significance, because it means the Church has
> misunderstood the creation-fall-redemption story for most of its
> history. Not to say these things can't be discussed, but I think it's
> only fair to acknowledge that they are theologically significant.
>
>
>
> On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 8:22 PM, George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com> wrote:
>>
>> Phil -
>>
>> I think I've already spoken to this. In relation to your #4, it's not just
>> "origins" that are dynamic, it's the whole story told in scripture, from
>> Genesis through Revelation. You're focusing too narrowly on the 1st few
>> chapters of the Bible.
>>
>> However, an abstract "dynamism" - or "prcess" some might say - isn't the
>> theological center. The center is Christ, & Eph.1:10 says that the uniting
>> of all things with him is God's "plan for the fullness of time." The fact
>> that the Incarnation didn't take place at the beginning of creation in
>> itself indicates that God never intended the world to remain in a static
>> condition of perfection.
>>
>> As to the other points -
>>
>> It may have been that the first humans in a theological sense, & the first
>> to sin, were a single couple but ther genetic evidence seems against it.
>> But if that were to turn out to be the case it wouldn't require any
>> significant changes in the model I suggested earlier. Of course it's
>> natural, given their history & the traditions & sources they had, that the
>> origin of humanity in the Bible is pictured as having been in Mesopotamia.
>> (Though strange as it seems, conservative biblical scholars debated about
>> the location of paradise - "East Prussia" is my favorite candidate.) But
>> this has no theological significance.
>>
>> Shalom
>> George
>> http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: philtill@aol.com
>> To: gmurphy@raex.com ; asa@calvin.edu
>> Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 7:03 PM
>> Subject: Re: Golden Age (was Re: [asa] Humanity and the Fall: Questions and
>> a Survey)
>>
>> George,
>> the question this raises in my mind is what consistent hermeneutic do you
>> use to determine what aspects of Genesis have "significant correspondence"
>> to the scientific view of the world versus what parts of Genesis do we
>> consider to be non-literal? For example,
>>
>> 1. Only one pair of first humans -- myth?
>> 2. That it was not just a single human who went astray (read, a
>> "community") -- correspondence
>> 3. That the first humans were in Mesopotamia -- myth?
>> 4. That origins was a dynamic process -- correspondence
>>
>> How do we know that the correspondence is not simply due to ad hoc
>> selection? Can a consistent hermeneutic be verbalized?
>>
>> Phil
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com>
>> To: ASA list <asa@calvin.edu>
>> Sent: Mon, 5 May 2008 12:13 pm
>> Subject: Golden Age (was Re: [asa] Humanity and the Fall: Questions and a
>> Survey)
>>
>>
>> Rich Blinne wrote, "It is clear that we currently live in a (physically)
>> fallen World. It's at least worth considering that Paradise was hypothetical
>> in the proteon and will be real in the eschaton." He's on the right track.
>> Much of the discussion of "Humanity and the Fall" shows the extent to which
>> the Christian tradition has bought into basically non-biblical ideas and
>> thereby lost touch with one of the crucial agreements between the biblical
>> view of creation and what science has been showing us.
>>
>> The "basically non-biblical ideas" are (1) the myth of a primordial "golden
>> age" in which everything was perfect and (b) the Urzeit-Endzeit myth
>> according to which everything will finally be restored to its orginal state.
>>
>> The "crucial agreement" is between the biblical picture of a dynamic
>> creation and the scientific reality that the world is dynamic at all levels,
>> ranging from elementary particles through biological evolution to the
>> expansion of the universe.
>>
>> Explication. 1st, the Bible never speaks of a primordial golden age. It
>> never says that there was no death at the beginning of creation. It never
>> even says that humans would be free from all suffering, difficulties &c.
>> It's significant that the more sophisticated of those who want to hold on to
>> some belief in a primordial "state of integrity" have already been forced by
>> what we know about the world to tone down their ideas about what that state
>> was. E.g., Strimple, in the article which David O posted earlier, said that
>> the 1st man was created "morally perfect in knowledge, righteousness and
>> holiness." This belief in moral perfection is a comedown from what Calovius
>> could say in the 17th century: "It is called a state of integrity, because
>> man in it was upright and uncorrupt (Eccl.7:29) in intellect, will, the
>> corporeal affecti ons and endowments, and in all things was perfect. They
>> call it also the state of innocence, because he was innocent and holy, free
>> from sin and pollution." (Emphasis added.)
>>
>> 2d, the Bible uses of the Urzeit-Endzeit motif only in the form of "broken"
>> myth. In Hosea 2:14 the Urzeit is the time when God found Israel in the
>> wilderness, not the beginning of the world. Revelation 21-22 certainly has
>> paradisal elements but it's clear there that the Endzeit includes much more
>> than the Urzeit. The final picture is not of a garden but of a city into
>> which "the glory and honor of the nations" will be brought.
>>
>> The importance of this is that in the biblical view history matters. God
>> intended the world to have a history - as Augustine expresses when he says
>> that God did not make the world in time but with time. The Urzeit-Endzeit
>> myth, OTOH, is essentially a denial of history. It doesn't matter because
>> everything will come back to the way it was in the beginning. That's why so
>> many religions have such a myth - it's a way of fleeing from what Mircea
>> Eliade called "the terror of history."
>>
>> In the Bible, history matters. God tells humanity at the start to "be
>> fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it," words that would be
>> senseless if the world was supposed to remain in a state of static
>> perfection. Already in the Sabbath of the 1st creation story there is a
>> hint of God's goal for history. And God acts in and through historical
>> events.
>>
>> And that picture agrees in its broad outlines with what science has shown us
>> about the temporality of the world. So it's quite consistent with the that
>> view of God working in history to say that God also works through natural
>> processes in order to achieve his goal for creation.
>>
>> I'm sure that some here will be tempted to dodge the implications of what
>> I've said here by
>>
>> A) arguing for an oil and water mixture of biological evolution with a
>> miraculous creation of a first human whose moral perfection is immune from
>> detection by science, thereby avoiding the idea that God works through
>> natural processes, and/or
>>
>> B) appealing to a supposedly fundamental distinction between God's action in
>> history and God's action in nature.
>>
>> To which I will say now that I'm proleptically unimpressed. & I'll add that
>> I think it's sad for Christians to deny a significant correspondence between
>> biblical and scientific pictures of the world, a correspondence that
>> redounds to the credit of Christianity in relation to religions with
>> basically static or cyclical views of reality.
>>
>> Shalom
>> George
>> http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
>> ________________________________
>> Plan your next roadtrip with MapQuest.com: America's #1 Mapping Site.
>
>
>
> --
> David W. Opderbeck
> Associate Professor of Law
> Seton Hall University Law School
> Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology
>
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Received on Tue May 6 21:37:23 2008
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