Yes, the young lads at Sydney Anglican have been asking and asking for the Lord Archbishop’s disparaging and unchristian remarks about us creationists. How impatient was their baying for blood, even accusing us of making up the whole affair. Of course, we can’t prove that now because they’ve (principally the son of the Lord of Sydney, Michael Jensen!) erased the majority of their posts and run off to hide behind their mothers’ skirts.
But it is the timing that interests us: How come someone – we have no idea who – posted Jensen’s ‘hillbilly’ quote, and “poof!”, they all run away? Was it all too much for you that we weren’t the liars you continually made us out to be? What a bunch of snotty-nose, unethical, unmanly, privileged kids.
OHHHHH! How sad. We’re really – no really – going to miss your reasoned and masculine arguments.
Well, here are those quotes. Read ‘em, and weep, lads!
1. “You may criticise fundamentalism as both intellectually disreputable and politically dangerous but the vacuous emptiness of secularism is no alternative.” [Jensen] added: “We must not allow ourselves to be dismissed as fanatics and fundamentalists, but have confidence in the integrity of our message and in the plain teaching of scripture.” (SMH, ‘Anglican leader takes on fundamentalists’, 27-28th October 2001, p. 9.)
Say what, Peter? What were those last words? ‘Plain teaching of scripture’. What plain BS! What Orwellian speak!
2. ‘I [Paul Sheehan] asked if creationism is making a comeback in scriptural studies at one leading Anglican school, which is what some parents have told me.
‘Peter Jensen replied: “We are evangelicals, not fundamentalists…The attitude of the media is to treat us like rednecks. I have a 12 and a half inch piano but I’m still treated as though I’m a small man.” Sorry, guys…just a comedic sidetrack. Peter actually said, “I’m a graduate of Oxford but I’m still treated as a redneck.” (SMH, ‘Derided, ignored and unstoppable’, 11th August 2003, p. 11.)
What an elitist prig! I would have preferred if he had cited his organ size…it would have made more sense!
Picture this, guys: “So John. You say all those things about your rabbi but you’re just some sort of fisherman, aren’t you? Unless you’ve attended the finest universities in Athens or Tarsus we are not going to listen to a word you say. After all, the validity of a man’s message is related to the size of his member, isn’t it? Sorry, Freudian slip. I mean, how many degrees he’s earned and the name of his university.”
‘Dr Peter Jensen…is restive about the usual fundamentalist epithet thrown at the Sydney diocese. He says the term derived from a defence of orthodox Christianity but, unfortunately, an impression grew that fundamentalists are anti-intellectual.
‘Defending Sydney and his college from such attitudes, he suggests that in the US “the fundamentalist badge was worn with pride by some Christians and may have represented an anti-intellectual and somewhat hillbilly type of person.” Jensen says not only is the term pejorative but many think fundamentalism “uses the Bible in a literalistic way, [and] adheres to…creation science.” (The Australian, ‘Heart and Soul’, 7th October 2000.)
I am not quite sure what he is saying, but my guess is that if you take the Bible, particularly at Genesis 1, literally, if you hold to God’s creating the earth in 6 24-hour days, that Jesus didn’t use evolution, then you are anti-intellectual, a hillbilly, couldn’t have attended Oxford and you probably have a small willy to boot.
In the same article as the above quote, Dr John Woodhouse believes that “the Bible is the word of God written, and by this word God makes known himself.” Really, John? Since you, like the Lord of Sydney and all of the Moore faculty, don’t take God’s words in Exodus 20:11 and 31:12-18 at their face value, it means that the Jews and the vast majority of Christians right up until quite recently actually misunderstood the information about God, written by God. What’s more, that hillbilly Moses would have misunderstood it because after all God was catering to a man of his time and not to any historical truth. That is, God failed to give details about himself clearly and it wasn’t until you guys came on the scene that we truly managed to understand what God was actually trying to say about his will and actions after all those years. Sounds a bit like the Mormon story. Well, what uneducated and hillbilly people those Jews and Christians must have been.
Let me relay just how happy we are that you guys have been put in charge of leading the flock.
John
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It seems that these Anglocompromisers are obsessed with the idea that Genesis 1 is a polemic against pagan mythology, not history (even though it has just the right form of a structured Hebrew narrative). Thus they feel they can overturn traditional Jewish, Patristic, Reformed and Wesleyan interpretations and invent new ones that don't conflict with uniformitarian/evolutionary "science".
But this is a false dichotomy. A true history by its very nature is a polemic against false views. Indeed, the early church recognized that the creation of the sun on Day 4 was a formidable polemic against pagan sun worshippers -- but only because God historically did create the sun after the earth and vegetation.
Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch (2nd C):
‘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, AD 181, Ante-Nicene Fathers 2:100.]
Basil the Great (4th C):
‘Heaven and earth were the first; after them was created light; the day had been distinguished from the night, then had appeared the firmament and the dry element. The water had been gathered into the reservoir assigned to it, the earth displayed its productions, it had caused many kinds of herbs to germinate and it was adorned with all kinds of plants. However, the sun and the moon did not yet exist, in order that those who live in ignorance of God may not consider the sun as the origin and the father of light, or as the maker of all that grows out of the earth. That is why there was a fourth day, and then God said: “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven.”’ [Basil, Hexaëmeron 6:2; http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/32016.htm.]"
Again, the polemic value depended on its historical truth. And the corollary is, if it is not historical, then it is a pathetic polemic.
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