One of the comments on the previous post mentioned the view that Genesis creation accounts are a polemic against other creation accounts.
This got me thinking.
Here's a polemic against the bombing of Hiroshima (apologies to any Japanese readers who may find this touches on some unwanted memories).
"In my aviary I have a bird. Its called Enola Gay. The bird has been trained to drop seeds on the cavy I also keep in the aviary. The cavy is called HIroshima.
From now on, we can be content that the story of Enola Gay dropping an atom bomb on Hiroshima is a myth, because our polemic uses a different story but features the same names."
There, its done. The polemic crafted!
Now, try telling that to a victim of the atom bomb. Think they'll thank you?
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1 comment:
Exactly right, Eric. For a polemic against a false history to make any sense, it must present the true view of history.
Refuting Compromise points out:
In fact, early church writers used the literal fourth day creation of the sun as a polemic against paganism. For example, in the second century, Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch, wrote in an apologetic work to the learned pagan magistrate Autolycus [Theophilus, To Autolycus 2:15]:
‘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.’
In the 4th century, Basil the Great commented on the same passage [Hexaëmeron 6:2]:
‘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.”’
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So the truth will automatically be a polemic against falsehood. Conversely, it would be useless to argue against a pagan using Genesis if it were just a story―one must show that the pagan is contradicted by what God actually did.
Also, most Framework proponents have a naïve view of paganism. Real pagans didn’t just worship the physical object, but a god behind it (cf. 1 Corinthians 10:19–20). For example, the Babylonian Shamash, the sun god, was sometimes personified as the sun itself, but at other times was clearly distinct from the sun. So if the Israelites said to the Babylonians, ‘The Sun isn’t a god; our God made the Sun’, a sophisticated pagan would reply, ‘I believe my god created the sun, too―maybe they are the same.’
Therefore, it’s actually no wonder that Genesis 1 has no disclaimer that it’s only a polemic, and nor do later biblical writers use it as a polemic. Real anti-pagan polemics which recognize the god behind the object are found in Isaiah 37:18–20 and 45:12–20.
[See also another type of polemic: ridicule. E.g. Isaiah 44 laughs at the absurdity of chopping off half a block of wood to fuel a fire, and carving an idol out of the other half to worship. Yet some churchians today whinge when apologists ridicule the absurdity of the modern idolatry of evolutionism.]
Another problem with the pagan polemic idea is the likelihood that Genesis was the original and the pagan myths were the result of distortions of that original account. There is archaeological evidence consistent with the biblical teaching that mankind was originally monotheistic, and only later degenerated into idolatrous pantheism.
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