Reading the comments on my post on the Finnish shoot up, it seems that the notion of Genesis 1 as being about time is a point of some issue. One commenter (Geoff) was indicating that one could attest the words of Genesis 1 while denying their truth status! I don't know how, and I wonder if the author has really thought out the implications of this bifurcation of meaning.
In this connection, I read today in the latest issue of Creation (21(3)) p. 97 f. in Kay, M "On literary theorists' approach to Genesis 1: Part 2"
" "This belief that the concern of the Genesis' author is atemporal is one replete with irony. It is ironic because such a misunderstanding opens the door to nothing less than a full revisitation by a pagan world-view. As several authors have extensively indicated, the removal of real time or chronological history is a marker for paganism. It cannot be an outlook informed by Jewish concerns because a biblical, Hebraic mindset was deeply and inextricably attached to 'the march of time'. Indeed, God himself was 'in time', so the writer of Genesis could not but reflect this also. Meir Sternberg calls this the 'grand chronology' and says that this interest with orderly sequence pervades the Bible and is Jewish to the core: ".. .chronological sequence is the backbone of the bible's narrative books, their most salient and continuous organizing principle. It figures not as a time-line that we reconstruct from some entangled discourse to make sense of what happens . . .[but is] an unfolding of events from prior to posterior, from cause to effect. So for the Bible to communicate is to chronologize the surface itself, the narrative as well as the narrated sequence of events . . . the order of presentation in the biblical text follows the order of occurrence in the biblical world. In this the Bible contrasts with the entire tradition of large-scale temporal disordering, fathered by Homer's plunge in medias res and widely elevated ever since into the repository of artful arrangement . . . what could be more ab ovo than beginning with the very beginning of the world, hence of time, indeed with the word "beginning" (bereshit) itself? What could make (and herald) a more orderly sequence than the march of Creation from the first day to the climactic sixth, then to the seventh with its sense of rest and arrest, fulfillment and closure? Beginning, middle, end -- each finds its proper place and value in this paradigm of order. Indeed, the books from Genesis to Kings, all likewise conceiving of story as divine history, follow suit both individually and in canonical series." "
References in this passage are:
Eliade, M. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, Jaki, S. Science and Creation, and Sternberg, M. Time and space in biblical history telling: the grand chronology.
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3 comments:
The denial of real time in Genesis 1 goes like this, I think:
"God created, but not how he said"
So, one asks, 'how do you know he was creator at all then?'
"We know better, what really happened is that matter formed itself to produce love" So, God is subsidiary to events within 'creation', rather than, as the Bible teaches, creation is subsidiary to actions (words) of God, whose means of action was his word, and what is seen was not made out of what is visible. Hebrews 11:3 (I think).
Critias, there is more to the logical problem.
Sure, if the only information about God's creating is denied in the detail, and it is in the detail that the communication occurs, then it is hard to see how the 'generality' has any substance.
Problem number 1 for the 'God created but we can make up how' position.
A further problem is that if Genesis 1 is claimed to be a metaphor, figurative or allegorical, then to make that judgement, we must know its point of reference, that is, what did really happen that forms the basis for the figure etc.
So to say that Genesis 1 does not or cannot really tell us what happened, then we MUST know what did happen. From what I've read, it seems that conservative theologians defer to materialist claims that evolution explains all; when in fact that idea is a fully unclothed emperor, and very easy to criticise.
The confusion is between 'science' and materialism masquerading as science. On the part of the church: too little prophetic criticism, too little exercise of the grey matter, too much "like me, like me, oh please like me", which gets us nowhere and lets people think that materialism successfully explains away the revelation of God, and so leaves them without hope and denies the path to proclamation which Paul himself relies upon!
Thanks for taking it futher Eric.
The intriguing thing that Geoff raised in a comment on your earlier post was that Anglican churches to his knowledge did teach God's postion as creator/carer, etc.
What I find odd about this is, if the truth of the world's history is given by the pagan story: long ages, material evolving, and 'God' is tacked onto the front of this as its 'cause'. Then the pagan is just offered a 'story' not the confrontation of the truth.
But God has demonstrated the truth of his being creator, and it being an act/acts flowing from his will, by its very extraordinariness: matter could not form to the cosmos in 6 days about 6000 years ago: its all too soon. This is God's 'I'm not just telling you, I'm showing you'. Anyone can make stories, but its action that counts. I think this is why the creation is important to acknowlege and teach. This is God, not far from us, with our real space-time world directly from his hand. Sin is more profoundly disasterous, but salvation more pointedly loving in this framework.
On the other hand, if the Creation is just a 'God-story' tacked onto the front of a sequence of events as described by the pagan-materialist view, it really lacks tangibility, and reality does not reflect God's words. Hard to tell a Finnish teenager who God is, if aimless materialism is not undone in reality, concretely.
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