Last night, my wife was talking to our son (not quite 4) about being a friend of God. She asked if he wanted to be a friend of God, and he said 'yes'. So my wife prayed with him on that basis.
The ensuing conversation went like this:
S: where is God?
W: God is everywhere.
S: who is God?
W: God made us, he made everything
S: even me?
W: yes, even you.
S: and my mummy and my daddy?
W: yes, daddy and I too.
That's the heart of it for here.
Interesting that the chief credential (as I put it) is that God is our creator. This recurrs throughout the OT as well; as does God being the one who brought Israel to the promised land: both, it would appear, anchored in the same historical continuity of events in time.
So on the one hand my son is convinced that God is our creator and can be our friend. He even talk about being 'at God' and having 'new life'; then on the other, he's going to hear at school (probably) that the story of the world is nothing like the story of the world in the Bible; the world-story, and the accompanying ontological framework he will be taught will not be about God as creator, or our dependence upon him, or that reality is finally personal (and here's the evidence: God was there first, spoke and the material creation occured); but that material was there first, and that over untold aeons, random material action produced the world.
If we don't deal with this, and he learns that the Bible is just 'stories' that do not have a real space-time reference, and that the 'real' stories with space-time reference are about a non-creation, then where is God's self-representation as 'creator'. Up the creek, I'd say.
The distinction God makes, taking his word at its direct meaning, is that his action in creation, by his word, and not out of other things, is very different from what appears being made from what is visible (Heb 11:3).
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Stories: what a great angle!
There are two competing stories at work (probably more if we include other religions: the East is 'of what I think').
Story 1: There is no God (sub-title: the cosmos made itself)
This is an old story that reaches back into antiquity. It was elaborated through the 18th and 19th centuries, receiving its polish in the 20th with neo-Darwinism.
The basic line in this story is that matter is all that is real, and any emergence of God is circumscribed by the fundamental materiality of reality.
So, in this story, with its billions of years of shuffing atoms, God-talk is the result of the shuffling.
Proclaiming the gospel into this story, or accepting this story, constrains 'god' to the terms of the story. (Like pagan cosmogonies, or theogonies, there is the assumption of the cosmos, the cosmos remains the independent setting, it is a 'given')
The other story is not like that at all. The cosmos is not 'given' but created.
This 'story' (its the true story, IMO because Christ underpins it) is that God spoke the cosmos into existence. We all know the rest.
The two stories do the job of stories (so they have a 'mythic' element, without implying truth of falsity at the factual level; refer to Mary Midgley's book on Evolution as Myth). That is they self-consistently explaim the world of our experience and give our experience a setting.
If we try to meld the two stories, we end up with incoherent hash (I note that 'incoherence' seems to be one off Peter Jensen's favourite jabs for ideas he doesn't like).
The story where the cosmos is from God, meaning that the fundamentals of reality are personal, not material, is connected to the historical flow of the OT, giving the entire frame of our life-world in an historical and derivative ontological continuity that is consistent, tracable and makes uniform reference to the time-space context.
If we jettison this story as a whole, and graft the bits we like onto the other story, then we attempt to meld two divergent historical and ontological frameworks. One starts of with an axiomatic denial of the personal, the other with its necessity.
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