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

> 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.)

There is a transition from not sinful to sinful, and the various
curses in Gen. 3 also point to an altered state. This is not to say
that the popular versions of Eden do not add a lot in (e.g., it's
clear that there was plenty of work for Adam before-Eden is pictured
as a garden where trowels rather than hammocks prevail). However,
there's a difference between making Eden into a daydream of what we'd
like things to be and viewing Eden as different and in a certain sense
better. Better only in a certain sense, because history is indeed
leading into something better. (For the present discussion, I am not
concerned with the literality or singularity of Adam, Eden, etc.
Whether or not the garden image is literal, that image is of a place
of fruitful toil.) While the golden age image is incorrect, there
seems to be a difference between a golden age and merely claiming that
Adam and Eve fell from a different state. "in all things was perfect"
is ambiguous in this regard-does it merely mean "without sin" or does
it also involve "as developed as humanity ever would be"?

> 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.

There's also the use of the image of return to primordial chaos,
though in a way that's the opposite-pessimism rather than the return
to the good old days. The return to the wilderness, return to David,
etc. themes also often explicitly envision a final version improved
over the first.

> 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.

And quite inconsistent with attacking the reliability of historical
evidence, as some young earthers do.

> 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

Moral perfection and imperfection alike are immune from detection by
science-not sure exactly what you're getting at there.

The degree to which evolution plus miraculous creation is an oil and
water mix depends on the view of God's methods. Punctuated deism,
like the usual YEC and ID rhetoric, is a disparate mix. The view that
God is intimately involved in all events, in the vast majority of
cases working them according to the patterns of natural laws but
occasionally using other methods, provides a consistent approach (and
one that is Biblical). Of course, recognizing that God occasionally
works miracles such as the resurrection does not require belief in the
separate creation of humanity, and the physical data strongly point to
use of ordinary means in the creation of at least our bodies.

> 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.

There's certainly a nice parallel between the biblical pattern of
progressive development of humanity and revelation and the
evolutionary picture, though at the same time both reject the premise
so popular in modern thought that humanity is inherently progressing.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama
"I think of my happy condition, surrounded by acres of clams"
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