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

Phil -

Again I have to be brief. In speaking about correspondence between biblical and modern scientific worldviews is the broad picture of temporal change. That's something that shows up over the whole biblical; story so picking out one part or another isn't the point. As to determining which parts of the Bible are historical narrative & which aren't, it's not really the task of a general hermeneutical principle to do that. One has to look at evidence - internal & external - for particular items.

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 11:09 PM
  Subject: Re: Golden Age (was Re: [asa] Humanity and the Fall: Questions and a Survey)

  Hi George,
  I threw you off completely by listing those four things, which weren't the issue I was asking about -- they were just four examples of how I think you are very comfortable taking some parts of the Bible account as true and other parts as literary myth. My only question was how do you determine which parts are which? I am asking this not to imply you are wrong in doing so, but because I genuinely want to know what is your guiding hermeneutic in biblical theology. I do already understand your overarching hermeutic is Christological and I see the beauty of that, but that hermeneutic alone leaves many things unanswered. In general terms (not addressing the specifics), how do you decide that one particular part of Genesis can be ignored and yet another part evidences amazing correspondence to reality, if it is not merely ad hoc selection after-the-fact? I have my own approach, but I want to hear yours.
  Phil

  -----Original Message-----
  From: George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com>
  To: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Tue, 6 May 2008 8:22 pm
  Subject: Re: Golden Age (was Re: [asa] Humanity and the Fall: Questions and a Survey)

  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/

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Received on Wed May 7 03:51:57 2008