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Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Pass Me the Cigarette Lighter Will Ya!

A mass book burning is about to break out in the Sydney Diocese of the Anglican Church or, at the very least, one theologian is about to have his books placed on the "NOT RECOMMENDED" list of publications within the Diocese.

Noted author R.C. Sproul has, after many years of consideration, reverted to the Reformation Hermeneutic on interpretion of Genesis. In effect, R.C. Sproul has become a Young Earth Creationist. You know, the much despised hillbillies, those seven thousand in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Baal.

More information on this can be found at:
http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/5774

R.C. Sproul sets himself apart from many in the Sydney Anglican Diocese in this and in another very important feature - he was prepared to allow Holy Spirit to lead him away from the thinking of the world and, instead, toward the Word of God.

He is courageous. Pity there aren't a few more like him in this Diocese of the Anglican Church.

Neil Moore

3 comments:

Eric said...

Is this the herald of a sea change in conservative biblical discussion?

Along with Flew's late change to theism from materialism (and wow, what a change that was!); are we seeing the beginning of the end for evolutionary posturing?

I'd hope so, but think not, alas. The ideas of the universe having made itself and humanity responsible to no one but itself have a long heritage.

But at least if the evanagelical church stops encouraging the idea that the world and our experience of it are explicable apart from our history with God, then we might see people brought to repentance as the truth of their state becomes known to them.

As it stands, if the church lets people believe that basic questions of state and place are not answered in the Bible (that is, the Bible contains no truth (concretely) about our origin and it from the hand of God), then people have plenty of excuses for rejecting God and adhering to materialist, pagan, and other imaginary views of the real world and their place in it, as obvious members of the real world.

SADists appear to forget that we are materially circumscribed and members of a material world, so material questions are germane, and therefore of theological signficance. Of course, there is a sort of Barthian rejection of this, but who cares about idealists; they get parking tickets too!

But SADists don't deal with this, and set up Genesis as some type of fiction to teach some kind of 'truth'. But not 'truth' as we know and use it here on Earth, it would seem.

Genesis for them is relegated to mere polemic, or a framework of something about which we have no other information (except materialist claims, of course, but they proceed on the asumption of no-God), and so Really, tells us nothing.

The arc of their thinking breaks when they acknowledge Jesus as truly man who died truly and rose truly: bodily; but his creation is not truly grounded or connected simply with God's action; as Genesis 1 would have it, and so the trace of their theology, its 'geneaology' founders and finally fails.

Healyhatman said...

Young Earth Creationists aren't people to be praised... Maybe people like you fawn over their rather literal interpretation of the bible, but there's a problem.

There's no evidence to support the idea that the universe or even the earth is only 6-12,000 years old. There's plenty of evidence against it, of course, but none for it.

Why would you think it a good thing to dismiss everything scientists know about the creation of the world for a book written in the bronze age by nomads? When the stories in that book barely ever make sense?

Consider Genesis... 30 I think it is. I'm on dialup away from my broadband-connected house so I'm not going to look it up.

The story in Genesis where a man breeds multi-coloured goats from white goats by having them look at coloured sticks when they mate.

Why would you think it the height of rationalism and intelligence to believe in such crap? For those of you with children, when they were conceived did you hold a white piece of paper in front of your eyes to make sure you didn't have coloured babies? "Heaven" forbid you accidentally glanced at your wallpaper, you might have had green or purple or SPOTTED children?

Oh wait, no you wouldn't because just like the bible story, that's crap.

Ktisophilos said...

As answered elsewhere, the account shows that God disabused Jacob of his superstition of sympathetic magic.