Sandy does Genesis . . . to a crisp

Text of a letter I sent to a few clergy brothers after Sandy Grant had published his views on the interpretation of Genesis 1 in The Briefing, last year.

Dear brothers,

I was very disturbed to read of an article in The Briefing, which attempts to find a common ground between contemporary belief and the revealed word of God in Genesis 1 (and on).

It is commendable to seek common ground where we can, to enable the clear proclamation of the gospel, but when the exercise of finding common ground means that the word of God is made subservient to the transitory beliefs of a culture which has turned its back on God, it is essential that godly men stand up and name the sin.

I do not doubt Sandy's (the author's) genuine desire to assist in the proclamation of the gospel; but he has done so by firstly denying that Genesis 1 is factual, and secondly, does this to allow the survival of a set of beliefs about the world which are not the result of scientific endeavour, as he describes it, but are the fruits of men who have taken as their basic axiom that the Bible has nothing to say on the matter of God's work in the totality of our world's history. Sandy has confused modern science with modern materialism and *its* axioms which reject most profoundly that our God has anything to do with our lives, if he exists at all.

The witness of the scripture is overturned and our Lord's reliance on it denied in a flourish of post-modern artifice at Sandy's hand. He undoes himself though.

Does he really think that Moses thought he was compiling a passage which didn't actually reflect events which God used to bring about the world? Does he really think that the modern invention of some form of non-historical history will assist us to proclaim the gospel to those who reject the God we worship? Whenever Christians have attempted to render the scriptures compatible with atheistic beliefs, it is not atheists who have become Christians, but Christians who have surrended their faith, and become atheists. I think of prominent men such as Richard Rorty, the philosohper, EO Wilson the evolutionary sociobiologist, Templeton, once a colleague of Billy Graham's who turned from his faith and quenched the Spirit, it would appear. Remarkably, Josef Stalin is another who was bewitched by evolution from his priestly studies to become the leader of the most foul regime of all time.

If we don't stand on the Scripture, we are, finally, undone, and Sandy's approach may represent the threshold of a path which will undo the gospel in Sydney.

Nor does his logic assist us. If Genesis does not really relate what happened, but is a mere figment; which is what it must be if those events did not occur; then God's statement in Ex 20:11 is nonsense. I don't think the sense that Sandy has of the text is one that was abroad much before the 19th Century with the rise of Hegelianism (unless we discount the gnostics of the early centuries of the faith). I am doubly disturbed that he applies a meaning which is contrary to the text and cannot emerge from the text itself. There is nothing in the literature which would indicate it is anything but factual.

Two features which are often cited against this are the use of ordinals to structure events, but in Numbers 7 we have a similar feature, and the use of chiasmis is thought by some to undercut factuality, but most of the Bible features chiasmis from the beginning to the end, and right through the historical books.

But back to his illogic.

If the events of Genesis 1 did not occur, then the only means God has given us to tell us what happened that shows he is our Creator and king cannot in fact show us that as it relies on the actual events! Deny the events, you must deny what only they can imply. If we have no truth about God creating, how do we say he is creator? All we are left with is the godless hopelessness of atheistic materialism. Why, I ask, does Sandy send us here, and not to a stronger proclamation of the gospel from Genesis on, as a prophetic church should be doing, fearlessly exposing the pretensions of men to the criticism of the gospel, firm in our confidence that the Spirit of God will not mislead us, but will vindicate our faith for his glory through the salvation of the lost?

I must also note, as a final remark, that it is where the long ages of earth history and the corollory theory of evolution are challenged by logic, science and the word of God that people are brought to faith. I know of many who come to faith this way; but none by the denial of the veracity of God's word in Genesis.

It is a final irony that Chistians incline their ears to the earth history times given by modern geological conventions, but fail to see that these conventions do not emerge from science or observations, but are the result of a prior commitment to naturalism. That is, the conventions start with the statement that there is no God and reality is finally material, not finally spiritual, and ethics is an emergent phenomenon of material, whereas the Bible tells us that it is basic, because God is love.