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Monday, November 2, 2009

What is Peter Doing #2?

Just so we don't loose track of this post about Peter Jensen's crazy talk at synod, here 'tis again.

A synopsis of the post is that PJ seems to think that you can have your materialist cake and eat it too, without undoing the biblical teaching on origins; but the Bible refers to origins as making this world that we live in; not an imaginary world for mystical contemplation. That is clearly the terms of the Biblical account in Genesis 1.

Creation, like the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection had space-time coordinates that we could relate to our own world of experience; making God's acts acts of history and the real world. Setting the world, this world, as the scene of the connection between us and God, and the place of covenant. Peter's remarks threaten to jettison this, and defer to a world view that relegates God to an idle curiosity, if having anything to do with us at all.

Why he does this is that he rejects the link that God makes between us and him and claims that it points to some other kind of link that is not in the Bible; so how that could be of biblical importance and worthy of a theologian's attention escapes me.

The Holy Spirit seems to go all out to align the creation as events that are delimited by space-time as is the world we experience, in fact, it is the same world and described in the same terms as the world we can identify. This tells us how we are related to God (consider the Lukan genealogy of Christ). Peter says this doesn't work, is not important in the terms in which it is set in the Bible, and other stories of the world are more significant for our self-understanding.

However, the terms he chooses to defer to are better at setting a self-understanding that dismisses God as creator and makes God cosmic spectator, if not absentee landlord. In doing this Peter risks becoming more of a deist that a Christian theist, IMO.

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