Re: Golden Age (was Re: [asa] Humanity and the Fall: Questions and a Survey)

George said: 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.

I respond: you are right, and it's refreshing to hear this. Doesn't
anyone who wants to really accept the findings of the natural sciences
have to give up being a traditional evangelical Christian? Isn't all
the rhetoric about the complementarity of faith and science only true
if one gives up many traditional Christian beliefs?

On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 9:33 PM, George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com> wrote:
>
> 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
> >

-- 
David W. Opderbeck
Associate Professor of Law
Seton Hall University Law School
Gibbons Institute of Law, Science & Technology
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