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

Terry - again quickly. That's just the type of thing I referred to when I
said people are willing to whittle down the golden age - making it a coiuple
of hours on one afternoon is an example of that. Gen.2-3 of course
specifies no length of time at all betwten creation of man & woman & their
sin.) But the idea of the golden age is still being retained.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
----- Original Message -----
From: "Terry M. Gray" <grayt@lamar.colostate.edu>
To: "AmericanScientificAffiliation" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 12:27 AM
Subject: 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.
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> Chemistry Department
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Received on Wed May 7 03:54:26 2008