Jensen reprise

Mr Jensen's desire to have his posts removed from the blog will be unmet. Two reasons. One, he chose to post, and that is the end of the story: public is public, Michael, secondly your efforts are a great case in point for the heretical teaching and practice that flows through rivers in the Sydney Diocese. Your remarks typify the ecclesiastical fascism which underpins Sydney life.

The case in point is this. Mr Jensen storms around riding on the coat tails of his father's position, when Jesus tells us very clearly that the first will be last and the last first, and that we aren't to go around using 'prestige' position or power as the world uses it. We are in fact bound to treat each other with honesty and respect. I note that Peter Jensen is unable to do this. Like father, like son.

I was reading in the Financial Review on Friday (3 May 07) that Miltion Friedman, the famous Chicago School economist took pains to correspond with everyone who wrote to him, wether economic neophyte, opponent, or not. I contrast this with Peter Jensen, who, if being obedient to the Bible, would place himself as servant of the church, not 'leader' 'head honsho' or 'the big biscuit'. After he lampooned his brothers and sisters who hold to the historic Christian position on the meaning of Genesis 1, who adhere to the Chicago statement on bibilical inerrancy (what does happen in Chicago??), who ascribe to that great statement of faith expressed in the series of books 'the Fundamentals' published as a bulwark against liberalism in the USA in the 1930s (from whence the term, of abuse for some, taken as an honour by others 'fundamentalist'), by calling us 'hillbillies'; and I never fail to remind all that he thus lampoons Broughton Knox, I wrote to him, expressing my anger, dismay and pain at his behaviour. I heard not a word. Here we have it, Milton Freidman, arguaby a 'great' man, is able to correspond with anyone about mere economics, but Peter, the main biscuit in Sydney, is unable to correspond with a brother he has sworn to serve, as part of the limb of the church in which he orbits. Makes me want to vomit from my mouth any Anglican allegience that I might have had. Incidently, it was in evangelical anglican churches that I've experienced the worst treatment, in 'broad', 'high', or 'catholic' that I've experienced the best of fraternal love.

By the way, I hope others read the Fin Review. The Friday 'Review' pages often have great religious articles. Of course, the religion they extol is invariably evolution . . . demonstrating the need to deal with this idea soundly as part of our evangelism (as Paul sets out in Acts 17, for example, an example the Anglicans and evangelicals broadly choose to ignore).

While I'm on the subject of periodicals, There is another stimulating article on Dawkin's 'The God Delusion' in the current Quadrant magazine (Richard Dawkins and the Morality of the Bible by David Hodgson). The author deals with Dawkins philosophical thinness with respect to his arguments for atheism, but also discusses moral issues which surround segments of the Old Testament. I hope to post some thoughts on this in the near future, God willing. Quadrant can be found at , along with its sister publication

I've recently started reading Thucydides' 'The Peloponnesian War', as I've decided to work through the highlights of classical literature. The introduction by M. I. Finley is itself worth a read. A remark about Thucydides' historigraphical approach is germane to this blog. I'll quote:

"The historian's data are individual events and persons; the sum total of their interrelationships is the historical process. Unlike the poet, he must get the events and the relationships right, exactly as they were, and not, in Aristotle's phrase about tragedy, as they might or ought to have been ..."

Considering Genesis 1, one is struck by the care taken by the author (let's say, Moses' because that's what the Holy Spirit tells us) to give the precise order of events, using grammar and selecting words so that alternatives are not possible (I refer to the historical consequentive grammatical structures in Genesis 1, the care to delinate sets of events by dirunal progress, and the description of the type of 'day' meant as 'evening and morning' type days, counted so that it is unavoidable that individual days are identified, described and events ordered).

If the events related are merely what they 'ought to have been', then we have fiction, poetry, as Aristotle might characterise it (entertainment, as we might refer to it today). What if the opening chapters of the Bible were fiction. Not telling us what happened, and not, therefore, locating us in history, in relation to God and in relation to our environment, which itself is not spiritual, not worthy of worship, but material, as from the hand of God? Well, if it was fiction, because this is the bald alternative to history (Aristotle refers, by implication to only the two categories), then it is not connected to history: to events which actually happened, and so, despite the neo-orthodox telling us that it is meant ot convey 'theological' but not 'scientific' truth (as thought truth wears colours like football teams), it tells us nothing, because it is not relating what is real, but imaginary. So a piece of imaginary writing cannot tells us anything real about God's status in realation to the physical universe, or us, as there is no source of information for us to determine the truth content of any utterance. We are left with the arbitrary, not the truth. If we know that something is false, then it cannot tell us anything, particulalry when some claim that Genesis tells us something, but not the things that it tells us. This is the basic logical impasse that the neo-orthodox have backed themselves into. In fact, they have backed off a plank over the side of a ship: they have nowhere to go but oblivioun (episemologically), because they have removed any warrant for the text being connected to the common world. It really is 'blow your brains out' thinking by the neo-orthodox, the sort of thinking that results in existential obliteration of the revelation, as I see it in adolescents, who are completely adrift, believing that they are material jumbles, not image bearers of God.