The Sydney Diocese, headed by Peter Jensen, and its training and educational wing, Moore College, continue to promulgate views that resemble the dualist views of the early heretics. It is not so much that the Sydney ideology bares a one-to-one correspondence to, and thus is indistinguishable from, the much earlier heretical groups’ ideas, but rather they evince a more or less similar attitude to creation theology. It is because Sydney Anglicanism exercises an almost pathological disquiet over self-examination, particularly with regard to first principles, there is a real urgency to examine this common ground. After all, turning away from God’s revelation and refusing all dialogue, as the Sydney Anglicans clearly do, is ultimately self-delusion.
Marcion restricted true Christianity to the Gospel of Christ and Paul, and little else. Marcion’s enterprise was principally accomplished by deracinating the New Testament from its Jewish history. He further cemented his project by having someone other than Jesus as the universe’s creator. Both aspects are unambiguously identified in the contemporary apologetics of Sydney Anglicanism. The latter will be examined first.
(i) As a builder or architect applies his intellect, his word, so to speak, in a firsthand fashion to the materials he works with, so God analogously brings complex structures forth. Unfortunately, virtually all details of Jesus being creator are expunged or ignored, and certainly never overtly celebrated or proclaimed within the diocese. In place of Wisdom, the Logos who “was beside the Lord as a master craftsman and who was daily the Lord’s delight”, Sydney Anglicanism posits, as Will Durant ascribes to Plotinus in particular, an “intermediary deity who had done the work of creation”. No longer are thought processes or intelligence the link from God to matter, but another principle or emanation stands between the Creator. This principle serves to replace God’s direct participation, and so it must be another, lesser “god”. More often than not, this secondary god is proclaimed as the principle time and chance (i.e. evolution). By philosophically injecting this principle with an ontology, this other god does the creative work of the triune God. Time and chance as functionaries within a material world, oppose the hands-on-approach that intellect is characterised by. Furthermore, by inserting this “being” between God, the project of viewing the creation (i.e. science) takes on more and more of a naturalistic philosophical mindset. The creator thus becomes unknowable, a genuine dualist worldview. The Sydney Anglicans have returned Christianity back to the earliest of heretical theologies.
Whether you personify this principle of change and fruition and claim it is God’s method of creation is irrelevant. What Sydney Anglicanism has offered up as real is in fact not God but a lesser being or principle. God’s activity is no longer His mind or Logos, but a principle of the cosmos or matter.
On more than one occasion I’ve asked Sydney Anglicans whether they believe Jesus is Creator. I’ve become steeled to their characteristic response: silence, though sometimes a stammering and confused search for a coherent response that betrays the unaccustomed nature of the question. Their Jesus is purely the soteriological Jesus, but never the creator Jesus because another “god” is doing his work. With this enervation in place a robust theology of creation based on the triune work of all members of the Godhead is entirely absent.
As an aside throughout their Forum site and Anglican blogs frequent animosity is expressed toward creationist argument that creationists are promoting another Gospel and that they, the Anglicans, are the genuine Christians because they are, like Paul, “determined to preach Christ crucified”. Seldom do they notice that they have left out half the verse, omitting the conjunction which Paul deliberately included to let the reader know that he considers Christ to be both redeemer and creator.
Andrew McGowan, in summing up his paper, ‘Marcion’s Love of Creation’, writes,
“World-denial may be a presupposition for Marcion, but it is not the last word. The strangeness and power of Marcion’s theology came from its claim that the alien god saves human beings without having any affinity with them whatsoever. Salvation was not the restoration of a relationship with the Creator, but the creation of one with the Stranger. Marcion thus emphasizes not origins but destinies. “Just this one work,” Marcion said, “is enough for our God: that by his surpassing and unique kindness, which is worth more than any number of locusts, he freed humanity.” Marcion neither started nor finished with cosmology, but rather with soteriology, the one great and simple creative work that superseded, and sometimes transformed, the complex and banal reality of material things as they stood. Of course Marcion did not love the old creation as such, but heralded the new; but just as his higher god had acted to save Christians, certain things in the old world – or rather from it – could be loved, selectively, problematically, and passionately.”
(ii) Another clue, and the first feature of Marcion’s theology mentioned above, is his bowdlerization of Hebrew history. It has been noted that this censorship was a natural outcome of his theological system. Sydney Anglican disdain for the historicity of so much of Torah is also an epistemological outworking of their a priori worldview and their reliance on pagan and secular ideologies and beliefs. One can read on their forum incredulity toward, inter alia, a universal flood, the Exodus record of Canaanite expulsion by the Hebrews, the patriarchal genealogies and, of course, their favourite whipping boy, the creation history of Genesis 1.
Take Owen Atkins description of humanity’s first parent, Adam, the one being who historically separates us from the animal world (and belying evolution, distinguishes us from mushrooms, amoebas, dinosaurs and trilobites!). With a chutzpah that clothes itself in the faux humility of nescience, Owen says, “Truth to tell I simply regard Adam as metaphor or archetype. If the Jews at that time[sic.] believed him to have been real, well then that is reflected in the text. I’m not convinced I should follow suit...Paul apparently believed in Adam as a real person.”
Yes, Owen, those dumb Jews, and that dumbest of the dumb, Paul, all those years ago, just couldn’t distinguish the shadow from the reality. Yes, Owen, called by God, while on the 426 as it journeyed from Moore College and passed by St Andrew’s House, to enlighten us creationists that Paul was mistaken.
Hang on, even Jesus was in error, wasn’t he, Owen? Didn’t Jesus make several references to the first man? Crikey, mate, even the Being who gave life to Adam was delusional and couldn’t distinguish metaphor from mud!
And what about the Flood?
Watch out folks, here comes that ass-kickin’, Kung Fu warrior theologian Craig Schwarze who is “favourably disposed toward the flood being a local event.” Craig’s initial defence of the indefensible (Hey, Craig, reread the Genesis account. Over and over again it says, “all life died”, “all the earth”!) is that he knows “that someone saying ‘the world’ 5,000 years ago meant something different to what we mean today.”
So, what, Craig, are you saying that the Holy Spirit when He assisted Moses to write Torah really meant a few 1000 hectares of land was flooded but He got carried away into hyperbolic writers’ fantasy land (read, dramatic literary genre effect) and said “all the earth”? Or are you saying poetic license?
But perhaps more perplexing is Craig’s delusion that he has a hotline to 5,000 years ago. Hey, Craig, can you tell me what old man Noah ate for breakfast that morning?
The second of his apologetics for disbelieving a universal flood is…wait for it…”there is a fairly recent theory from credible secular scientists that is quite interesting. They believe that the…rising Mediterranean Sea…caused massive flooding of the area – around 150,000 square km!”
!50,000 square kilometres?! Squared out that’s a mere 400 kilometres by 400 kilometres. Why on earth would Noah bother putting a whole bunch of animals on board, in pairs, for a small flood? Why would you build a boat in the first place if you knew your little area was going to be flooded out? Why not just take the first flight out of there and kick back on a beach, martini in hand, and wait it out? Maybe he didn’t know and God was just being a right deceiver and telling Noah a whole bunch of porkies for decades and decades just to give Noah some work and to practise his carpentry skills? Maybe….?
What does Peter, under the persuasion of the Holy Spirit, say about beliefs like yours?
“[A]ll things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.” For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water.” (2 Peter 3:4-7)
Then there’s Kevin Goddard. I won’t bore you with the details, but in order to understand the Flood and its after effects, he goes to the atheist and hubristic polymath Karl Kruszelnicki. Let’s not examine the credible evidence from specialists who have devoted their whole scientific career to investigating nature in order to understand the Flood, (Christians, I’m talking about, Kevin – no, that would be too asinine!), but rather let’s seek guidance from a man who denies the existence of practically everything a Christian stands for, from a man who once bragged to me that he had solved a problem that I’d said, sans exaggeration, a Noble Prize would be due if he had. In other words, let’s completely ignore the fact that the author of Scripture is God himself and suck up to a bloke who thinks you’re a turkey for even believing in God, let alone any flood that’s mentioned in the Bible. To borrow Perry Wiles’ words, have you blown your brains up, dear boy?
Their inflated sense of self-worth (and sense!) often ambiguates their arguments. I’m still not sure if Dave Lankshear is taking the piss or he is so far gone down the evolutionary chain that he has totally lost the plot, biblically speaking. Dave, dear boy, do you really believe that “God was upholding the entire universe and guiding every atom and quark and particle on its journey from supernova through to sentient, self aware neural network. We are “star stuff”, but we are also collections of self aware energy networks fashioned from the stuff of supernova”? Let me quote someone who lived near the beginning of Christianity’s rise to prominence. Hear what Theophilus of Antioch has to say about such blatherings:
"On the fourth day the luminaries came into existence. Since God has foreknowledge, he understood the nonsense of the foolish philosophers who were going to say that the things produced on earth come from the stars, so that they might set God aside. In order therefore that the truth might be demonstrated, plants and seeds came into existence before the stars. For what comes into existence later cannot cause what is prior to it" (To Autolycus 2:15 [A.D. 181]).
The lack of precision and ahistoricity which these Anglicans maintain are underlying the Genesis account is indicative of an anti-Semitic attitude. (This psychology also underpinned Marcion’s theology.) By claiming that these ancient Jews did not think conceptually like us and used basic words in a completely different sense, recalls the perennial view that seeks to transform Jewish culture to “other”.
******
Naturally, as I’ve stated, this is no complete mirroring of the earlier heretical program; but there is a distinct attitude of mind that sets it self up against traditional, orthodoxy. As a general principle, the Old Testament’s earliest sections, varying from individual to individual, are regarded as inferior, false (often stated as “unhistorical”, “figurative history” or some such euphemistic label!) or something to be reinterpreted through an eisegetical framework.
Throughout the Anglican Forum’s vast length (inexorably approaching 100 pages) are scattered ample indications that far too many of its contributors regard themselves, by their continual denigration of, and their sarcastic attacks upon, Christians who subscribe to a historical and literal 6-day creation, as superior and possessors of the true knowledge of Jesus Christ and the Bible.
How different were the early Christian apologists who were ready to, and did, defend God’s Word from the pagans and heretics who corporately robbed it of its accuracy and historical truth. They recognised in commonsense fashion that the days of Genesis clearly spoke of 24-hour days and that God’s revelation did not speak in riddles: it meant what it said and said what it meant.
a. Theophilus of Antioch: "All the years from the creation of the world [to Theophilus’ day] amount to a total of 5,698 years and the odd months and days. . . . [I]f even a chronological error has been committed by us, for example, of 50 or 100 or even 200 years, yet [there have] not [been] the thousands and tens of thousands, as Plato and Apollonius and other mendacious authors have hitherto written. And perhaps our knowledge of the whole number of the years is not quite accurate, because the odd months and days are not set down in the sacred books" (To Autolycus, 3:28–29).
Marcion restricted true Christianity to the Gospel of Christ and Paul, and little else. Marcion’s enterprise was principally accomplished by deracinating the New Testament from its Jewish history. He further cemented his project by having someone other than Jesus as the universe’s creator. Both aspects are unambiguously identified in the contemporary apologetics of Sydney Anglicanism. The latter will be examined first.
(i) As a builder or architect applies his intellect, his word, so to speak, in a firsthand fashion to the materials he works with, so God analogously brings complex structures forth. Unfortunately, virtually all details of Jesus being creator are expunged or ignored, and certainly never overtly celebrated or proclaimed within the diocese. In place of Wisdom, the Logos who “was beside the Lord as a master craftsman and who was daily the Lord’s delight”, Sydney Anglicanism posits, as Will Durant ascribes to Plotinus in particular, an “intermediary deity who had done the work of creation”. No longer are thought processes or intelligence the link from God to matter, but another principle or emanation stands between the Creator. This principle serves to replace God’s direct participation, and so it must be another, lesser “god”. More often than not, this secondary god is proclaimed as the principle time and chance (i.e. evolution). By philosophically injecting this principle with an ontology, this other god does the creative work of the triune God. Time and chance as functionaries within a material world, oppose the hands-on-approach that intellect is characterised by. Furthermore, by inserting this “being” between God, the project of viewing the creation (i.e. science) takes on more and more of a naturalistic philosophical mindset. The creator thus becomes unknowable, a genuine dualist worldview. The Sydney Anglicans have returned Christianity back to the earliest of heretical theologies.
Whether you personify this principle of change and fruition and claim it is God’s method of creation is irrelevant. What Sydney Anglicanism has offered up as real is in fact not God but a lesser being or principle. God’s activity is no longer His mind or Logos, but a principle of the cosmos or matter.
On more than one occasion I’ve asked Sydney Anglicans whether they believe Jesus is Creator. I’ve become steeled to their characteristic response: silence, though sometimes a stammering and confused search for a coherent response that betrays the unaccustomed nature of the question. Their Jesus is purely the soteriological Jesus, but never the creator Jesus because another “god” is doing his work. With this enervation in place a robust theology of creation based on the triune work of all members of the Godhead is entirely absent.
As an aside throughout their Forum site and Anglican blogs frequent animosity is expressed toward creationist argument that creationists are promoting another Gospel and that they, the Anglicans, are the genuine Christians because they are, like Paul, “determined to preach Christ crucified”. Seldom do they notice that they have left out half the verse, omitting the conjunction which Paul deliberately included to let the reader know that he considers Christ to be both redeemer and creator.
Andrew McGowan, in summing up his paper, ‘Marcion’s Love of Creation’, writes,
“World-denial may be a presupposition for Marcion, but it is not the last word. The strangeness and power of Marcion’s theology came from its claim that the alien god saves human beings without having any affinity with them whatsoever. Salvation was not the restoration of a relationship with the Creator, but the creation of one with the Stranger. Marcion thus emphasizes not origins but destinies. “Just this one work,” Marcion said, “is enough for our God: that by his surpassing and unique kindness, which is worth more than any number of locusts, he freed humanity.” Marcion neither started nor finished with cosmology, but rather with soteriology, the one great and simple creative work that superseded, and sometimes transformed, the complex and banal reality of material things as they stood. Of course Marcion did not love the old creation as such, but heralded the new; but just as his higher god had acted to save Christians, certain things in the old world – or rather from it – could be loved, selectively, problematically, and passionately.”
(ii) Another clue, and the first feature of Marcion’s theology mentioned above, is his bowdlerization of Hebrew history. It has been noted that this censorship was a natural outcome of his theological system. Sydney Anglican disdain for the historicity of so much of Torah is also an epistemological outworking of their a priori worldview and their reliance on pagan and secular ideologies and beliefs. One can read on their forum incredulity toward, inter alia, a universal flood, the Exodus record of Canaanite expulsion by the Hebrews, the patriarchal genealogies and, of course, their favourite whipping boy, the creation history of Genesis 1.
Take Owen Atkins description of humanity’s first parent, Adam, the one being who historically separates us from the animal world (and belying evolution, distinguishes us from mushrooms, amoebas, dinosaurs and trilobites!). With a chutzpah that clothes itself in the faux humility of nescience, Owen says, “Truth to tell I simply regard Adam as metaphor or archetype. If the Jews at that time[sic.] believed him to have been real, well then that is reflected in the text. I’m not convinced I should follow suit...Paul apparently believed in Adam as a real person.”
Yes, Owen, those dumb Jews, and that dumbest of the dumb, Paul, all those years ago, just couldn’t distinguish the shadow from the reality. Yes, Owen, called by God, while on the 426 as it journeyed from Moore College and passed by St Andrew’s House, to enlighten us creationists that Paul was mistaken.
Hang on, even Jesus was in error, wasn’t he, Owen? Didn’t Jesus make several references to the first man? Crikey, mate, even the Being who gave life to Adam was delusional and couldn’t distinguish metaphor from mud!
And what about the Flood?
Watch out folks, here comes that ass-kickin’, Kung Fu warrior theologian Craig Schwarze who is “favourably disposed toward the flood being a local event.” Craig’s initial defence of the indefensible (Hey, Craig, reread the Genesis account. Over and over again it says, “all life died”, “all the earth”!) is that he knows “that someone saying ‘the world’ 5,000 years ago meant something different to what we mean today.”
So, what, Craig, are you saying that the Holy Spirit when He assisted Moses to write Torah really meant a few 1000 hectares of land was flooded but He got carried away into hyperbolic writers’ fantasy land (read, dramatic literary genre effect) and said “all the earth”? Or are you saying poetic license?
But perhaps more perplexing is Craig’s delusion that he has a hotline to 5,000 years ago. Hey, Craig, can you tell me what old man Noah ate for breakfast that morning?
The second of his apologetics for disbelieving a universal flood is…wait for it…”there is a fairly recent theory from credible secular scientists that is quite interesting. They believe that the…rising Mediterranean Sea…caused massive flooding of the area – around 150,000 square km!”
!50,000 square kilometres?! Squared out that’s a mere 400 kilometres by 400 kilometres. Why on earth would Noah bother putting a whole bunch of animals on board, in pairs, for a small flood? Why would you build a boat in the first place if you knew your little area was going to be flooded out? Why not just take the first flight out of there and kick back on a beach, martini in hand, and wait it out? Maybe he didn’t know and God was just being a right deceiver and telling Noah a whole bunch of porkies for decades and decades just to give Noah some work and to practise his carpentry skills? Maybe….?
What does Peter, under the persuasion of the Holy Spirit, say about beliefs like yours?
“[A]ll things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.” For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water.” (2 Peter 3:4-7)
Then there’s Kevin Goddard. I won’t bore you with the details, but in order to understand the Flood and its after effects, he goes to the atheist and hubristic polymath Karl Kruszelnicki. Let’s not examine the credible evidence from specialists who have devoted their whole scientific career to investigating nature in order to understand the Flood, (Christians, I’m talking about, Kevin – no, that would be too asinine!), but rather let’s seek guidance from a man who denies the existence of practically everything a Christian stands for, from a man who once bragged to me that he had solved a problem that I’d said, sans exaggeration, a Noble Prize would be due if he had. In other words, let’s completely ignore the fact that the author of Scripture is God himself and suck up to a bloke who thinks you’re a turkey for even believing in God, let alone any flood that’s mentioned in the Bible. To borrow Perry Wiles’ words, have you blown your brains up, dear boy?
Their inflated sense of self-worth (and sense!) often ambiguates their arguments. I’m still not sure if Dave Lankshear is taking the piss or he is so far gone down the evolutionary chain that he has totally lost the plot, biblically speaking. Dave, dear boy, do you really believe that “God was upholding the entire universe and guiding every atom and quark and particle on its journey from supernova through to sentient, self aware neural network. We are “star stuff”, but we are also collections of self aware energy networks fashioned from the stuff of supernova”? Let me quote someone who lived near the beginning of Christianity’s rise to prominence. Hear what Theophilus of Antioch has to say about such blatherings:
"On the fourth day the luminaries came into existence. Since God has foreknowledge, he understood the nonsense of the foolish philosophers who were going to say that the things produced on earth come from the stars, so that they might set God aside. In order therefore that the truth might be demonstrated, plants and seeds came into existence before the stars. For what comes into existence later cannot cause what is prior to it" (To Autolycus 2:15 [A.D. 181]).
The lack of precision and ahistoricity which these Anglicans maintain are underlying the Genesis account is indicative of an anti-Semitic attitude. (This psychology also underpinned Marcion’s theology.) By claiming that these ancient Jews did not think conceptually like us and used basic words in a completely different sense, recalls the perennial view that seeks to transform Jewish culture to “other”.
******
Naturally, as I’ve stated, this is no complete mirroring of the earlier heretical program; but there is a distinct attitude of mind that sets it self up against traditional, orthodoxy. As a general principle, the Old Testament’s earliest sections, varying from individual to individual, are regarded as inferior, false (often stated as “unhistorical”, “figurative history” or some such euphemistic label!) or something to be reinterpreted through an eisegetical framework.
Throughout the Anglican Forum’s vast length (inexorably approaching 100 pages) are scattered ample indications that far too many of its contributors regard themselves, by their continual denigration of, and their sarcastic attacks upon, Christians who subscribe to a historical and literal 6-day creation, as superior and possessors of the true knowledge of Jesus Christ and the Bible.
How different were the early Christian apologists who were ready to, and did, defend God’s Word from the pagans and heretics who corporately robbed it of its accuracy and historical truth. They recognised in commonsense fashion that the days of Genesis clearly spoke of 24-hour days and that God’s revelation did not speak in riddles: it meant what it said and said what it meant.
a. Theophilus of Antioch: "All the years from the creation of the world [to Theophilus’ day] amount to a total of 5,698 years and the odd months and days. . . . [I]f even a chronological error has been committed by us, for example, of 50 or 100 or even 200 years, yet [there have] not [been] the thousands and tens of thousands, as Plato and Apollonius and other mendacious authors have hitherto written. And perhaps our knowledge of the whole number of the years is not quite accurate, because the odd months and days are not set down in the sacred books" (To Autolycus, 3:28–29).
b. Victorinus: "God produced the entire mass for the adornment of his majesty in six days. On the seventh day, he consecrated it with a blessing" (On the Creation of the World [A.D. 280]).
c. Lactantius: "Therefore let the philosophers, who enumerate thousands of ages from the beginning of the world, know that the six-thousandth year is not yet complete. . . . Therefore, since all the works of God were completed in six days, the world must continue in its present state through six ages, that is, six thousand years. For the great day of God is limited by a circle of a thousand years, as the prophet shows, who says, ‘In thy sight, O Lord, a thousand years are as one day [Ps. 90:4]’" (Divine Institutes 7:14 [A.D. 307]).
d. Basil the Great: "‘And there was evening and morning, one day.’ Why did he say ‘one’ and not ‘first’? . . . He said ‘one’ because he was defining the measure of day and night . . . since twenty-four hours fill up the interval of one day" (The Six Days Work 1:1–2 [A.D. 370]).
e. Ambrose of Milan: "Scripture established a law that twenty-four hours, including both day and night, should be given the name of day only, as if one were to say the length of one day is twenty-four hours in extent. . . . The nights in this reckoning are considered to be component parts of the days that are counted. Therefore, just as there is a single revolution of time, so there is but one day. There are many who call even a week one day, because it returns to itself, just as one day does, and one might say seven times revolves back on itself" (Hexaemeron [A.D. 393]).
*******
The Bible unequivocally proclaims that God acted triunely to bring creation into existence. Paul tells us that Christ is not only Saviour but that his role as Saviour is inseparably linked to who Jesus as God is:
He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence. (Colossians 1:13-18)
In other words, Jesus’ significance as the one who saves cannot be understood without tying it to the one by whom the Creation was made. This theme appears elsewhere in Paul’s writing:
"And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified." (1 Corinthians 2:1-2)
Contrast this with the narrow, legalistically-slanted substitutional soteriology that characterises the Sydney Anglican gospel message. It routinely ignores the further importance of what God did on the cross, namely, it is through his physical resurrection that his credentials as the Creator are established and which guarantees our redemption from death. As Paul says,
“For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross.” (Colossians 1:19-20)
If death is inherent in the creation, as many Sydney Anglicans propose, then Jesus could not physically resurrect. Death is not natural to the creation because, as the second Adam, death could not hold him. If “all [created] things”, not just man, are reconciled to God, and death is inherent in the cosmos, God then is reconciling death, not life, to himself. Furthermore, if Jesus could not physically resurrect he is not the Creator because death, as a principle, would hold sway over him. That Jesus as the first-born of all creation did physically resurrect shows he is Creator.
******
Putting aside all the particulars of their heretical attitudes, the most disturbing aspect is that all these people are welcomed as genuine Christians (and Anglicans), their doctrines are never corrected, and as soon as someone expresses a traditional approach to Genesis they are sneered at, viewed as unequally yoked and endlessly depicted as deranged. That seals it for me.
*******
The Bible unequivocally proclaims that God acted triunely to bring creation into existence. Paul tells us that Christ is not only Saviour but that his role as Saviour is inseparably linked to who Jesus as God is:
He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. And He is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence. (Colossians 1:13-18)
In other words, Jesus’ significance as the one who saves cannot be understood without tying it to the one by whom the Creation was made. This theme appears elsewhere in Paul’s writing:
"And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with excellence of speech or of wisdom declaring to you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified." (1 Corinthians 2:1-2)
Contrast this with the narrow, legalistically-slanted substitutional soteriology that characterises the Sydney Anglican gospel message. It routinely ignores the further importance of what God did on the cross, namely, it is through his physical resurrection that his credentials as the Creator are established and which guarantees our redemption from death. As Paul says,
“For it pleased the Father that in Him all the fullness should dwell, and by Him to reconcile all things to Himself, by Him, whether things on earth or things in heaven, having made peace through the blood of His cross.” (Colossians 1:19-20)
If death is inherent in the creation, as many Sydney Anglicans propose, then Jesus could not physically resurrect. Death is not natural to the creation because, as the second Adam, death could not hold him. If “all [created] things”, not just man, are reconciled to God, and death is inherent in the cosmos, God then is reconciling death, not life, to himself. Furthermore, if Jesus could not physically resurrect he is not the Creator because death, as a principle, would hold sway over him. That Jesus as the first-born of all creation did physically resurrect shows he is Creator.
******
Putting aside all the particulars of their heretical attitudes, the most disturbing aspect is that all these people are welcomed as genuine Christians (and Anglicans), their doctrines are never corrected, and as soon as someone expresses a traditional approach to Genesis they are sneered at, viewed as unequally yoked and endlessly depicted as deranged. That seals it for me.
Posts
3 comments:
Does this Owen Atkins agree with the humanist of the year Plimer, whose lying book he adulated, that belief in life after death is proof that people have not been taught to think?
Ktisophilos,
Oh brother, too good, too good!
Ain't it all too spooky that these guys first find support in men who are really anti every thing Christianity is about, yet they accuse us of being cultish, like JWs and Mormons.
Tim
Not to mention demon possessed, as Rev. Gordon claims as a possibility. However, he would not be capable of putting this to a biblical test. However, let's follow the "noble Bereans" of Acts 17:11 and do the job for him, by testing the YEC positions with Scripture to see if what they say is true:
Creation in six ~24 hour days.
Ex 20:8-11 Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work,
10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. ... For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
The causal word ki in the Hebrew links the days of our working week with the days of creation week, showing that they are ordinary-length days.
Human Death is the result of the Fall, and is thus an intruder not an original part of creation
Gen. 3:19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
Rom. 5:12-14 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned ... Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses
1 Cor. 15:21-22, 26 For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. ... The last enemy to be destroyed is death.
Both humans and animals were originally vegetarian
Gen. 1:29-30; 9:3 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.
And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. ... Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.
There was a global watery cataclysm wiping out all but eight people and all creatures that breathed through nostrils that were not on the Ark
Genesis 7:19–23 ‘They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered. … Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind. Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the Ark.’
Hebrew for "all" is kol, and the double kol of "all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered" makes it universal. Why bother to build an Ark at all if the flood were just local??
1 Pet. 3:20 who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water,
2 Pet. 2:5 if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others;
2 Pet. 3:6 the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished.
So how did YECs do under the Berean test? All checked! How would millions of years and evolution fare if tested by Scripture? Miserable failure. Evidently Gordie is not as noble as the Bereans.
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