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

Is "Golden Age" a bit misleading here?

What if the probation/fall period was actually very short--just a few
days?

I seem to remember reading that Luther held the fall occurred on the
very same day that Adam was created--even before the first Sabbath.

If this is true then the theological dimensions of creation/fall/
redemption are preserved, but there may not be any significant
historical residue.

TG

On May 5, 2008, at 10:13 AM, George Murphy wrote:

> 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 affections
> 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/

________________
Terry M. Gray, Ph.D.
Computer Support Scientist
Chemistry Department
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
(o) 970-491-7003 (f) 970-491-1801

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Received on Wed May 7 00:28:54 2008