Search the dictionaries and you will find 'nature' defined as something corresponding to "Thing's essential qualities, person's or animals innate character". On another level, you think, speak and act according to your nature. As our Lord Jesus Christ put it "Each tree is recognized by its own fruit." (Luke 6:44)
It is important to remember this as you consider heresies which have arisen in Christ's Church since Pentecost. I am going to identify and comment briefly on some of the early heresies here following (much of the commentary is direct quoting from "Know The Truth" by Bruce Milne; Inter-Varsity-Press, 1981):
Ebionism
Derived from Jewish Christianity and attempted to solve a perceived problem of the relationship of humanity and divinity in Christ by effectively removing the divinity. Jesus was simply the human, though divinely appointed, Messiah who was destined to return at the end of the age to reign on the earth by God's sovereign power. In effect this left the gulf between God and man unbridged.
Docetism
Dates from apostolic times. In contrast to Ebionism it solved the problem by excising the humanity of Christ. Jesus only seemed human (Gk. doceo - seem). Its roots lie in Graeco-Oriental convictions that matter is inherently evil and that God cannot be the subject of feelings or other human experiences. Docetism was unacceptable because it cut the bridge between God and man at the other end; God did not really come to us, hence no effective sacrifice was made for our sins.
Gnosticism
The thought-world of Gnosticism has been said to be loaded with bizarre speculations, and it is unclear how far it was a unified system of thought. Christ is seen by some Gnostic writers as descended from the heavenly stratosphere or 'fullness' (Gk. pleroma); he united himself for a time with a historic person, Jesus, whose body was formed of a psychic substance, the two elements being loosely linked in him. Gnosticism clearly reflected a strong Docetic tendency. It effectively cut the bridge at both ends; neither true God nor true man, Christ was unfitted to be the mediator.
Arianism
Revolved around the views of Arius (256-336), a presbyter of Alexandria who had been influenced by the great teacher, Origen. Arius came to hold that 'the Son was created'. Arius had imbibed Plato's division between the tangible world of sense experience and the intangible world of ideas. God, the absolutely unique and unoriginated source of all things, belonged to the second of these worlds, so was radically separated from the created world. Once this framework is accepted there is obviously great difficulty in fitting the Son (Logos, the Word, Jn. 1:1) into the picture. Arius concluded that the Logos must belong to the creaturely side of being; hence he is not eternal,al5 but is himself a created being: 'there was a time when he [Christ] was not'. Christ is the most exalted of all creatures certainly, but ultimately only that.
Apollinarianism
Apollinarius (310-390), an over-enthusiastic supporter of Athanasius, held that in Jesus the eternal Word (Logos) took the place of the human soul. At the incarnation God the Son took up residence in a human body, so that Christ did not possess a full human nature. The position, obviously Docetic in tendency, was rejected since it in effect denies that God truly became man.
Nestorianism
Nestorius was appointed Archbishop of Constantinople in AD 428. In the interests of preserving the full manhood of the mediator, Nestorianism taught the separation of the two natures in Christ to the extent of rendering questionable his authentic personal unity; this rendered the incarnation invalid and imperiled salvation. Many scholars today believe that Nestorius himself did not hold many of the views attributed to him by his 'orthodox' opponents.
Eutychianism
Eutyches, an outspoken opponent of Nestorianism, championed the unity of Christ's person and claimed that, while there were two natures before the incarnation, there was only one composite nature after it. This implies that Jesus is a third sort of being, neither true man nor true God, hence unable to act as mediator. Eutyches was condemned at the Synod of Constantinople in 448, but reinstated somewhat dubiously at Ephesus in 449. Clearly matters could not continue in this manner and a major council was summoned at Chalcedon in 451 to resolve the debates once and for all. The statement of the Council of Chalcedon, which was deeply influenced by the more pragmatic theology of the West, failed to please all the parties but has been the basis for orthodox formulations of the person of Christ ever since.
So ends the examples of heresies I am going to recall from the early church. There have been others but sufficient are provided to make the point.
It should be noted that, for all intents and purposes, these heresies arose from people purporting to be Christian. It should also not escape the reader's attention that, at its root, each heresy was a corruption of the 'Nature' of Jesus Christ. Proponents did not think they were maligning the 'Nature' of Jesus Christ. Instead, they likely hoped to be a help toward a right understanding in believers as to the true 'Nature' of the Jesus Christ.
It is clear that in some instances, and probably all, that their world view influenced proponents in the formulation of their doctrine cum heresy.
It is also evident from closer study that some heresies had large following, had been influential in the life of the church for a long time and incurred great pain and diligence to remove them from Christ's Church. Even today, at least one of those heresies has life in religious bodies considered now to be non-Christian.
We should note from this sad history of the church that the 'Nature' of Jesus Christ is not something to be taken casually because it has far reaching consequences for the Gospel of Jesus Christ i.e. His 'Nature', the condition of Man, His work on the Cross for Man and His Resurrection. Clearly, the 'Nature' of Jesus Christ is intrinsic to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the faithful of old saw this, fought for it and won the battle.
For more than a century another heresy has gained momentum within the church and is proving very difficult to dislodge. Like those heresies of old it corrupts the 'Nature' of Jesus Christ. It is that heresy which ascribes to Jesus Christ a method of creation that is bloody, frustration filled, intelligence lacking, disease and death-riddled and it is that called Theistic Evolution. All those characteristics are necessary components of the Theory of Evolution proposed by Charles Darwin and advocated by Neo-Darwinists today. These same characteristics must therefore be similarly acknowledged by those in the church who seek to super-impose Jesus Christ over the process to arrive at their 'dog's breakfast' - Theistic Evolution.
In their rush to embrace the prevailing world view on Origins, Theistic Evolutionists lose sight of the 'Nature' of Jesus Christ borne in His Incarnate Being. Demonstrating their foolishness these heretics inconsistently recognize the 'Nature' of Jesus Christ in his communications and activities when Incarnate yet are obliged to divorce Him from that same 'Nature' in His creative works at the beginning of Creation. This has to be the consequence of ascribing a bloody, frustration filled, intelligence lacking, disease and death-riddled process to Jesus Christ in His creative works.
Compare for a moment that 'survival of the fittest' principle pregnant in the ordering of life according to the theory of (Theistic) Evolution. Is that principle to be found in the 'Nature' of Jesus Christ? Who:
"being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in the appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross." (Phlp. 2:6-8)
and said "Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth" (Matt. 5:5)
and "Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy" (Matt. 5:7)
and "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God" (Matt. 5:9)
and "Do not resist and evil person. if someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well" (Matt. 5:39-40)
and "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" Matt. 5:44)
Theistic Evolutionists, I have some questions for you.
Just who is the Jesus Christ you profess faith in?
What is the 'Nature' of this Jesus Christ you profess faith in?
How long will you espouse to the world the monster deity that you do?
How long will you continue eroding faith in Christ's Church?
Sam Drucker
Showing posts with label heresy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heresy. Show all posts
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Sunday, February 28, 2010
A test for orthodoxy?
Occasionally there’s a Jehovah’s Witness outside Central Station spruiking her heterodox, Arian-resurrected theology. As she’s a true believer, I’ve given up talking to this woman but the other day she was there discussing matters with a man that I’d not seen before. I just had to insert myself into the conversation.
Although not a JW, the man was clearly an Arian. I asked him if Jesus was the Creator. He replied that he wasn’t, that the Father, or as they claim, Jehovah God, is the sole creator. I then cited Colossians and John 1 where Paul and John state that through, for and by Christ everything has come into existence. The man then said that Christ was creator by virtue of the Father handing that responsibility to him. I expressed how queer that was, that someone is called a creator, the Father, yet does not create. I argued that it would be like my hiring someone to design a house but calling myself the architect. He tried to extricate himself from this impasse by claiming that no matter who the Father gives it to, he still remains the creator. Of course this is pure evasion and intellectually dishonest to boot.
Thinking about it later I could see similarities with Peter Jensen’s position. Peter, as has long been known, is an evolutionist*. Quite naturally Peter, along with all theistic evolutionists, has to play some irrational semantic games and alter the meaning of words in order to mould Scripture to fit a pagan worldview. Somehow – the details, scientifically or theologically, never exactly laid out – God is able to allow chance to create while never surrendering his office of creator. At this point I tend to think that Peter and the others are trying to turn a circle into a square but still have it called a circle. Beats me!
Anyway, the point I want to make is that Peter’s allegiance to evolution puts him outside of Christian orthodoxy, by a theological mile. If a metaphysical principle is creating the enormous amounts of novel biological information that life requires, then it isn’t our Lord doing it. New biological information is the product of thought, of teleonomic conception, not the randomisation processes being acted upon by natural selection that evolution posits as being its source (This is superbly argued in the triple-PhD Wilder-Smith’s book, God: To be or not to be?). Peter can’t have his square and circle be the one object: Either Christ, acting through will and thought, brings forth biological information, and thus life, or it’s chance randomisation of matter, the metaphysical principle of materialism. The two are incompatible and irreconcilable.
* Lest it be said that we are misrepresenting Peter’s views, the following is a quote from Doctrine 1 while he was principal at Moore College: “There is a division of opinion about how God created the world [Actually, there isn’t, Peter. The difference lies between those that truly believe the Bible is God’s unchanging revelation to mankind and those, like yourself, that believe it can change as science, so-called, “proves” God has less and less to do with. Just ask Jack Spong.]. From the standpoint of these notes the ‘theistic evolution’ account offers the best understanding….By ‘theistic evolution’ we mean that God created the world through the process of evolution [there’s that square-circle again folks!].” Doctrine 1, Unit 7, p. 105.
Although not a JW, the man was clearly an Arian. I asked him if Jesus was the Creator. He replied that he wasn’t, that the Father, or as they claim, Jehovah God, is the sole creator. I then cited Colossians and John 1 where Paul and John state that through, for and by Christ everything has come into existence. The man then said that Christ was creator by virtue of the Father handing that responsibility to him. I expressed how queer that was, that someone is called a creator, the Father, yet does not create. I argued that it would be like my hiring someone to design a house but calling myself the architect. He tried to extricate himself from this impasse by claiming that no matter who the Father gives it to, he still remains the creator. Of course this is pure evasion and intellectually dishonest to boot.
Thinking about it later I could see similarities with Peter Jensen’s position. Peter, as has long been known, is an evolutionist*. Quite naturally Peter, along with all theistic evolutionists, has to play some irrational semantic games and alter the meaning of words in order to mould Scripture to fit a pagan worldview. Somehow – the details, scientifically or theologically, never exactly laid out – God is able to allow chance to create while never surrendering his office of creator. At this point I tend to think that Peter and the others are trying to turn a circle into a square but still have it called a circle. Beats me!
Anyway, the point I want to make is that Peter’s allegiance to evolution puts him outside of Christian orthodoxy, by a theological mile. If a metaphysical principle is creating the enormous amounts of novel biological information that life requires, then it isn’t our Lord doing it. New biological information is the product of thought, of teleonomic conception, not the randomisation processes being acted upon by natural selection that evolution posits as being its source (This is superbly argued in the triple-PhD Wilder-Smith’s book, God: To be or not to be?). Peter can’t have his square and circle be the one object: Either Christ, acting through will and thought, brings forth biological information, and thus life, or it’s chance randomisation of matter, the metaphysical principle of materialism. The two are incompatible and irreconcilable.
* Lest it be said that we are misrepresenting Peter’s views, the following is a quote from Doctrine 1 while he was principal at Moore College: “There is a division of opinion about how God created the world [Actually, there isn’t, Peter. The difference lies between those that truly believe the Bible is God’s unchanging revelation to mankind and those, like yourself, that believe it can change as science, so-called, “proves” God has less and less to do with. Just ask Jack Spong.]. From the standpoint of these notes the ‘theistic evolution’ account offers the best understanding….By ‘theistic evolution’ we mean that God created the world through the process of evolution [there’s that square-circle again folks!].” Doctrine 1, Unit 7, p. 105.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Sydney Anglicans at the Zoo
The progeny of a male ass covering a female horse is a mule; the progeny of a male zebra covering a female horse is a zorse; the progeny of a male zebra covering a female donkey is a zeedonk, zonkey or a zebrass. Similarly, a male African lion covering a female tiger can produce a liger while the reverse cross produces a tigon. A male camel covering a female llama can produce a 'cama'. A male false killer whale covering a female bottlenose dolphin can produce a 'wholphin'. The list of hybrids goes on and extends quite broadly into the plant world.
What needs to be understood with hybridization is that it has its limits as to which animals or plants can be mated. Furthermore, the result of the mating is not the production of new genetic information which the evolutionary paradigm requires for validation of its argument. Instead, the existing genetic information passed on from the parents will produce a 'compromise' of expression in the progeny i.e. some features of one parent and some features of the other. There is then, a loss of complete expression of each parent's genetic information.
Sydney Anglicans upholding a Theistic Evolution model of creation ought to learn a lesson by observing what happens in the animal and plant world. A loss of information will occur when one takes the LORD and God revealed in creation, word and incarnation and attempts a 'hybridization' with a god who is the product of man's imaginings.
Elijah the Tishbite confronted Israel with a challenge when it was evident Israel was wavering in faith toward the God who had rescued their forbears from slavery in Egypt and who had revealed Himself in such a great deliverance. Elijah said "How long will you waver between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him." (1 Kings 18:21a & b)
As if to mimic the Israel of today expressed in Sydney Anglicanism when confronted with its sin by sydneyanglicanheretics, the Israel before Elijah said nothing in reply. (1 Kings 18:21c)
Oh that each generation of Israel would mimic Joshua from days of old who said "But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD." (Joshua 24:15b)
Theistic Evolution is the Baal of today. It is the presentation of a god alien to the LORD who has revealed His nature threefold in creation, word and incarnation. Worse still, it is the worship of a false god mixed with worship of the one true God who is LORD. Herein lies a hybrid lacking the distinctiveness of the Holy One of Israel.
What have you done Sydney Anglican heretics?
Neil
What needs to be understood with hybridization is that it has its limits as to which animals or plants can be mated. Furthermore, the result of the mating is not the production of new genetic information which the evolutionary paradigm requires for validation of its argument. Instead, the existing genetic information passed on from the parents will produce a 'compromise' of expression in the progeny i.e. some features of one parent and some features of the other. There is then, a loss of complete expression of each parent's genetic information.
Sydney Anglicans upholding a Theistic Evolution model of creation ought to learn a lesson by observing what happens in the animal and plant world. A loss of information will occur when one takes the LORD and God revealed in creation, word and incarnation and attempts a 'hybridization' with a god who is the product of man's imaginings.
Elijah the Tishbite confronted Israel with a challenge when it was evident Israel was wavering in faith toward the God who had rescued their forbears from slavery in Egypt and who had revealed Himself in such a great deliverance. Elijah said "How long will you waver between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him." (1 Kings 18:21a & b)
As if to mimic the Israel of today expressed in Sydney Anglicanism when confronted with its sin by sydneyanglicanheretics, the Israel before Elijah said nothing in reply. (1 Kings 18:21c)
Oh that each generation of Israel would mimic Joshua from days of old who said "But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD." (Joshua 24:15b)
Theistic Evolution is the Baal of today. It is the presentation of a god alien to the LORD who has revealed His nature threefold in creation, word and incarnation. Worse still, it is the worship of a false god mixed with worship of the one true God who is LORD. Herein lies a hybrid lacking the distinctiveness of the Holy One of Israel.
What have you done Sydney Anglican heretics?
Neil
Monday, October 26, 2009
Sydney Archbishop Jensen Avoids Conviction
The Sydney Episcopalian Diocese is holding its Annual Synod and I was interested in some comments from Archbishop Peter Jensen in his Presidential Address. An audio version of it can be downloaded from the Diocesan website.
It is common knowledge that the Diocese has shed about $100M of the value of its investments. The Archbishop referred to this in his Presidential Address and indicated he has reflected for a while on why it happened. Was it a judgment from God or a testing from God?
The Archbishop seems to have come down on the side of the latter because nowhere in his address does he call for repentance from a known sin. He is obviously ignorant of the singular and loud charge against the Diocese emanating from the Sydney Anglican Heretics blogspot or he rejects our charge. Instead, Archbishop Jensen defers to the experience of a Bible study involving leaders of the Diocese and their wives some months back where Deut. 11 was considered with Moses offer to Israel at the verge of the Promised Land of "blessing or curse" according to the nation's obedience or rejection of the commands of God. Apparently conversation at the Bible study quickly turned to innocent Joseph being punished with imprisonment for rejecting an adulterous relationship with Potiphar's wife and then mention was made of innocent Jesus Christ being punished for sins he did not commit.
Notice what happened in that Bible study to encourage the Archbishop that the Diocese under his leadership was not under judgment from God? Participants immediately shook off any question of guilt and looked to the suffering of innocents for explanation of the plight of the Diocese. It is, in effect, a repeat of "This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD " cries of Judah when rejecting any notion they were out of step with the word of God - all the while doing that very thing (Jer. 7:4).
Archbishop Jensen gives the game away as to his readiness to reject the word of God when he makes the following statement about climate change:
"Every time the weather behaves erratically, we are reminded of climate change and its likely consequences. The authoritative scientific consensus to the fact of change is so strong that it would be folly to ignore it."
The opinion of a noisy and, seemingly, surrounding scientific view is enough to influence the Archbishop as to what he and the Diocese should think about climate change. In other places and in other times Archbishop Jensen has made it clear the same is true for the question of origins even though that opinion runs up against the express word of God. However, in his address to Synod Archbishop Jensen somewhat schizophrenically says: "It would not be right, for example simply to express our own prejudices and guesses and to confuse them with the word of God" and "Our access to the mind of the Lord is through his word and we must look there for our answers, not to speculation." While the Archbishop is not discussing the question of origins here he is, nevertheless, pointing to the word of God for direction in understanding the difficulties facing the Diocese. He goes on to say "Their [Israel's] enjoyment of the fruit of the land depended on their continual obedience to the word of God."
That latter statement we can agree with. If only the Archbishop would back up the rhetoric with obedience.
Further comment warranting mention is "Our reading of God’s word, our preaching, prayers, singing, and fellowship, including our sacramental fellowship, must be honoring to God and edifying to his people." How is it honoring to God to massage, twist, smother or reject God's word when it clearly indicates a creative process and duration in stark contrast to the current world view synthesized by Archbishop Jensen to allow some involvement of God? How is such a 'dog's breakfast' edifying to the people of God?
Archbishop Jensen goes on to ask a question and proffer an answer as follows:
"Where will we be fifty years from now? We are up against a large challenge and there is no guarantee whatever that we will survive except as a small but wealthy cult. The cultural mood is not flowing with us, and immigrant numbers are also not in our favor. I realize that for many, Pentecostal Christianity is the answer and they will extol its attractions and its capacity to attract some of the very people who are missing from our churches. My problem with that suggestion is in the nature of Pentecostalism. I judge that its love-affair with modern culture will leave it insufficiently tied to historic Christianity, and that there is a chance that it will not be recognizably Christian in fifty years. That is a harsh judgment and I hope that I am wrong; but there are already signs of diversion from the fundamentals.
I do not doubt, therefore, that our commitment to conservative theology and to a high view of scripture is entirely correct. Only this will carry Christianity forward in a culture such as Australia in the next fifty years."
The stone thown at Pentecostal Christianity is thrown from within a glass house. While Pentecostal Christianity does have aspects of a "love-affair with modern culture" it is not as complete as Archbishop Jensen would have us believe. It is my observation that, on the subject of origins there is, in Pentecostalism, a broad and healthy adherence to the word of God. In contrast, the Sydney Episcopalian Diocese is far more inclined to have its own "love-affair with modern culture" which "will leave it insufficiently tied to historic Christianity, and that there is a chance that it will not be recognizably Christian in fifty years."
Finally, Archbishop Jensen urges "a commitment both to biblical theology and purity of doctrine, also to our neighbours." He cites four things to be done to achieve this. It is the first of these four things that catches in our throat like rancid meat.
He says: "First we must continue to cherish and support our College. But this is as long as, and only as long as, it embraces the heart of the theology of the Bible as expressed in the English Reformation. I wish you could all see the powerful effect which Moore College is having all around Australia and the world. Its teaching is the guardian of our theology and hence our life as a network of churches. More than that, the College has recognized as never before its duty to contend in the world of ideas, to speak for Christ and his word in the sphere of academic theology, of secular humanism and of world religion."
Whew! What can you say in dealing with those points one by one? I have to be brief.
1) The Diocese must immediately spurn or reform Moore College because the College has rejected Reformation principle of "Sola Scriptura" on origins and has departed from Luther and Calvin on origins.
2) The asserted "powerful effect" Moore College is having around all around the world on origins will only be destructive.
3) In its present doctrinal position on origins Moore College is as much a guardian of Diocesan theology as King Zedekiah was guardian of the future of Judah (Jer. 52)
4) Moore College does not contend with but absorbs academic theology, secular humanism and world religion on the subject of origins.
Throughout the history of pre-exile Israel and Judah there was a recurring theme of practicing ritual of belief in the word of God while often synchretising with the beliefs of the nations around them. Moses had warned against this before they entered the Promised Land. God sent prophets in warning once synchretism had commenced. Israel and Judah scorned the prophets because they believed they were right with God. As such, the word of God was treated with disdain.
The Archbishop of Sydney and the Episcopalian Diocese of Sydney must learn from the error of Israel and Judah. Cast off the notion that you are innocent. Examine your behaviour. See where you have departed from the way. Repent and believe in the word of God otherwise doom awaits.
It is not just that the word of God is cast down in this sin. It is the unmistakable corrupting of the attributes of God revealed in the Person of Jesus Christ that offends most. One only need look upon Jesus Christ in all he said and all he did to see that Theistic Evolution removes one so remotely from our Lord.
Surely our Lord will, in no wise, endure indefinitely an offence like the threefold corrupted representation of his Person by his people as occurred with the golden calf at the base of Sinai, at Bethel and at Dan.
Sam Drucker
It is common knowledge that the Diocese has shed about $100M of the value of its investments. The Archbishop referred to this in his Presidential Address and indicated he has reflected for a while on why it happened. Was it a judgment from God or a testing from God?
The Archbishop seems to have come down on the side of the latter because nowhere in his address does he call for repentance from a known sin. He is obviously ignorant of the singular and loud charge against the Diocese emanating from the Sydney Anglican Heretics blogspot or he rejects our charge. Instead, Archbishop Jensen defers to the experience of a Bible study involving leaders of the Diocese and their wives some months back where Deut. 11 was considered with Moses offer to Israel at the verge of the Promised Land of "blessing or curse" according to the nation's obedience or rejection of the commands of God. Apparently conversation at the Bible study quickly turned to innocent Joseph being punished with imprisonment for rejecting an adulterous relationship with Potiphar's wife and then mention was made of innocent Jesus Christ being punished for sins he did not commit.
Notice what happened in that Bible study to encourage the Archbishop that the Diocese under his leadership was not under judgment from God? Participants immediately shook off any question of guilt and looked to the suffering of innocents for explanation of the plight of the Diocese. It is, in effect, a repeat of "This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD " cries of Judah when rejecting any notion they were out of step with the word of God - all the while doing that very thing (Jer. 7:4).
Archbishop Jensen gives the game away as to his readiness to reject the word of God when he makes the following statement about climate change:
"Every time the weather behaves erratically, we are reminded of climate change and its likely consequences. The authoritative scientific consensus to the fact of change is so strong that it would be folly to ignore it."
The opinion of a noisy and, seemingly, surrounding scientific view is enough to influence the Archbishop as to what he and the Diocese should think about climate change. In other places and in other times Archbishop Jensen has made it clear the same is true for the question of origins even though that opinion runs up against the express word of God. However, in his address to Synod Archbishop Jensen somewhat schizophrenically says: "It would not be right, for example simply to express our own prejudices and guesses and to confuse them with the word of God" and "Our access to the mind of the Lord is through his word and we must look there for our answers, not to speculation." While the Archbishop is not discussing the question of origins here he is, nevertheless, pointing to the word of God for direction in understanding the difficulties facing the Diocese. He goes on to say "Their [Israel's] enjoyment of the fruit of the land depended on their continual obedience to the word of God."
That latter statement we can agree with. If only the Archbishop would back up the rhetoric with obedience.
Further comment warranting mention is "Our reading of God’s word, our preaching, prayers, singing, and fellowship, including our sacramental fellowship, must be honoring to God and edifying to his people." How is it honoring to God to massage, twist, smother or reject God's word when it clearly indicates a creative process and duration in stark contrast to the current world view synthesized by Archbishop Jensen to allow some involvement of God? How is such a 'dog's breakfast' edifying to the people of God?
Archbishop Jensen goes on to ask a question and proffer an answer as follows:
"Where will we be fifty years from now? We are up against a large challenge and there is no guarantee whatever that we will survive except as a small but wealthy cult. The cultural mood is not flowing with us, and immigrant numbers are also not in our favor. I realize that for many, Pentecostal Christianity is the answer and they will extol its attractions and its capacity to attract some of the very people who are missing from our churches. My problem with that suggestion is in the nature of Pentecostalism. I judge that its love-affair with modern culture will leave it insufficiently tied to historic Christianity, and that there is a chance that it will not be recognizably Christian in fifty years. That is a harsh judgment and I hope that I am wrong; but there are already signs of diversion from the fundamentals.
I do not doubt, therefore, that our commitment to conservative theology and to a high view of scripture is entirely correct. Only this will carry Christianity forward in a culture such as Australia in the next fifty years."
The stone thown at Pentecostal Christianity is thrown from within a glass house. While Pentecostal Christianity does have aspects of a "love-affair with modern culture" it is not as complete as Archbishop Jensen would have us believe. It is my observation that, on the subject of origins there is, in Pentecostalism, a broad and healthy adherence to the word of God. In contrast, the Sydney Episcopalian Diocese is far more inclined to have its own "love-affair with modern culture" which "will leave it insufficiently tied to historic Christianity, and that there is a chance that it will not be recognizably Christian in fifty years."
Finally, Archbishop Jensen urges "a commitment both to biblical theology and purity of doctrine, also to our neighbours." He cites four things to be done to achieve this. It is the first of these four things that catches in our throat like rancid meat.
He says: "First we must continue to cherish and support our College. But this is as long as, and only as long as, it embraces the heart of the theology of the Bible as expressed in the English Reformation. I wish you could all see the powerful effect which Moore College is having all around Australia and the world. Its teaching is the guardian of our theology and hence our life as a network of churches. More than that, the College has recognized as never before its duty to contend in the world of ideas, to speak for Christ and his word in the sphere of academic theology, of secular humanism and of world religion."
Whew! What can you say in dealing with those points one by one? I have to be brief.
1) The Diocese must immediately spurn or reform Moore College because the College has rejected Reformation principle of "Sola Scriptura" on origins and has departed from Luther and Calvin on origins.
2) The asserted "powerful effect" Moore College is having around all around the world on origins will only be destructive.
3) In its present doctrinal position on origins Moore College is as much a guardian of Diocesan theology as King Zedekiah was guardian of the future of Judah (Jer. 52)
4) Moore College does not contend with but absorbs academic theology, secular humanism and world religion on the subject of origins.
Throughout the history of pre-exile Israel and Judah there was a recurring theme of practicing ritual of belief in the word of God while often synchretising with the beliefs of the nations around them. Moses had warned against this before they entered the Promised Land. God sent prophets in warning once synchretism had commenced. Israel and Judah scorned the prophets because they believed they were right with God. As such, the word of God was treated with disdain.
The Archbishop of Sydney and the Episcopalian Diocese of Sydney must learn from the error of Israel and Judah. Cast off the notion that you are innocent. Examine your behaviour. See where you have departed from the way. Repent and believe in the word of God otherwise doom awaits.
It is not just that the word of God is cast down in this sin. It is the unmistakable corrupting of the attributes of God revealed in the Person of Jesus Christ that offends most. One only need look upon Jesus Christ in all he said and all he did to see that Theistic Evolution removes one so remotely from our Lord.
Surely our Lord will, in no wise, endure indefinitely an offence like the threefold corrupted representation of his Person by his people as occurred with the golden calf at the base of Sinai, at Bethel and at Dan.
Sam Drucker
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Stand in the ways and see and ask for the old paths
I had two rather interesting tales passed to me the other day. The concluding remark in one of these, if it weren’t true, might have quite easily served as a joke’s entertaining punchline. It concerned Moore College and its final spiritual and philosophical decrepitude. From without, and put simply, it clearly tips Moore over to the liberal side of the theological divide. More of both these stories later, but first a revisit to ancient Israel.
‘Thus says the LORD:
“Stand in the ways and see,
And ask for the old paths,
where the good way is,
And walk in it;
Then you will find rest for your souls.
But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
“And they have caused themselves to
stumble in their ways,
From the ancient paths,
To walk in pathways
And not on a highway.” (Jeremiah 6:16;18:15)
From the present’s obvious vantage point of being able to peer backwards to the distant past, I’ve often wondered why Israel found it so difficult to appropriately respond to God. Israel did believe in a “God”, of sorts. They understood that the world was created. The people understood that it wasn’t eternal or that it hadn’t just popped into existence from and because of nothing. That much is clear. But why did Israel, time and time again, take the wrong paths?
“How can you say, ‘We are wise,
And the law of the Lord is with us’?
Look, the false pen of the scribe
Certainly works falsehood.” (Jeremiah 8:8)
The prophets, repeatedly, spelled out the solution. It was clearly a product of leadership and these “God-appointed” men giving the wrong information. This specious knowledge didn’t suddenly appear one day, causeless, whole, a take-it-or-leave-it package, but incrementally worked its way into the general consciousness of the people through, and what was generally regarded as innocuous, alterations in revelation. I can almost hear the priests discussing it to the lay person: “Look, trust us. Aren’t we Kohenim, God’s elect. What’s it matter if you believe this? After all, isn’t the main focus of our nation to be on the fact that Moses rescued us from the yoke of the Egyptians? As long as you believe that God saved us, then the rest is secondary. Be reassured that the writers of sacred Scripture never meant that it should be taken so dogmatically as you suggest it should. A little bit of give between the text and reader is to be expected in our enlightened age. I wouldn’t have spent all those years studying at Jerusalem to be wrong on this.” Yes, I can very well imagine such self-serving justification.
Their fundamental error was to replace God and His revelation with themselves as the epistemological nub of their spirituality:
“For my people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters,
And hewn themselves cisterns – broken
cisterns that can hold no water.” (Jeremiah 2:13)
Once you substitute God as foundational for knowledge, anything and everything is up for grabs. We should be entirely faithful to God when His Spirit has spoken and we should intellectually honestly deal with that information. Too often people obstinately ignore God’s revelation and turn to another in order to form their understanding of the world.
“Why then has this people slidden back,
Jerusalem, in a perpetual backsliding?
They hold fast to deceit,
They refuse to return.
I listened and heard,
But they do not speak aright.
No man repented of his wickedness,
Saying, ‘What have I done?’
Everyone turned to his own course,
As the horse rushes into the battle.” (Jeremiah 8:5,6)
The other morning an acquaintance visited a local Anglican church. The minister and he had previously spoken by phone about Disconnect ’09 and conversation had immediately turned to the great miracle of creation. Some time later he had walked into the church to pass on an article about the genre of Genesis 1. The minister wasn’t there but his assistant was. Again, rather quickly, they began discussing Genesis 1. My friend pointed out to the young and recently graduated Moorite that he had misidentified historical prose as ahistorical poetry. The young man believed, among other things, that if a piece of writing contains repetition then necessarily it can’t be historical narrative. It was pointed out that on the contrary there is plenty of well-known ancient “secular” historiography containing this literary device. His reply was perhaps the most astounding my friend, or indeed I, have ever heard from a Moorite: “You are arrogant because you ignore the findings of postmodernism’s critique of modernism.”
There you have it: the words of wisdom from 4 years of what I can only label ‘brainwashing’ from an institution that is supposedly serving as Australia’s theological flagship. That this represents the zenith of critical thinking is hardly reassuring. Apparently, the best they can offer is to argue that my friend should throw away his personal relationship with God, in which he attentively allows God, the author of Scripture, to speak to his mind, and instead substitute his own intellect to be the basis for and interpreter of truth. The postmodern project says that the author is dead, allowing the reader to puts his meaning - or any other sinner’s or fool’s for that matter - into the text because the author can no longer speak.
And this is why these Moore graduates can look you in the face and tell you that 6 days does not mean 6 days because God’s intended meaning, if indeed He ever had one, has a shelf-life that has long expired. God, in as much as He is the author of His Word, is silent. If He is silent, then it follows that it is up to us to “discover” what happened at the very beginning.
“Cursed is the man who trusts in man
And makes flesh his strength,
Whose mind departs from the LORD.” (Jeremiah 17:5)
What in fact is happening is that these people are replacing God at the epistemological centre of the search for truth with an ersatz, with an idol of the mind. These people – and first-hand experience bears this out - are no longer approachable by reason because they have forsaken reason and committed adultery with another nation’s gods. Gods do not have to be a physical representation but are more likely to be, and considerably more harmful if they are, the way we think and whom we intellectually rely on.
“For it is the land of carved images,
And they are insane with their idols.” (Jeremiah 50:38)
The other story occurred at a University of NSW New College function. The speaker, a neo-natal expert from Britain and ostensibly a conservative, presented a lecture on ethics, abortion and biogenetic manipulation. In conversation afterwards he explained how he had complete faith in the scientific project, God’s revelation wasn’t perspicuous and that he was free to hold to a long age view of origins. It was pointed out to him that all of the miracles of the Bible were done in no time and perfectly, yet the biggest miracle, creation, according to his own view, was exceedingly slow and error-ridden. Ignoring all reason that instantaneity and perfection are how our minds recognise God’s miraculous working in nature, he shrugged his shoulders, smiled politely, and excused himself.
Clearly, all his mind’s thoughts had not been made captive to Christ and is a perfect example of a Christian’s outlook being directed by a foreign idol, in this case, the secular Enlightenment project. This philosophical approach splits up the things of faith and the things of science, thereby, in the case of the latter, promoting an independent, God-free epistemology in which the Lord is not all in all.
In August’s Southern Cross Moore College’s principal John Woodhouse makes an extraordinary sales pitch for the college. His first supporting argument is the “godliness” of its teachers. Until I read John’s comments I’d never realised in my nearly 30 years of being Christian that it was another man’s “godliness” that we are to set our sights upon, particularly upon those same men, whom John held up as paradigms of virtue, who would also read John’s article. I’d always thought that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” and that it was Christ’s holiness that we are to be subject to. Maybe I’ve missed something from these teachers of God’s law.
But even more alarming (is that possible?!) is John’s outrageous hypocrisy. Quite incredibly he delusionally argues that Moore has a “worldwide reputation for teaching how the whole Bible and all of its parts bear witness to Christ.” John’s italics here serve as a comedic self-parody. If John actually believed that, he would understand the Gospel and Christ’s first office of Creator; but he doesn’t. Christ clearly tells us in Exodus 31 that He “made the heavens and the earth in 6 days”, and John just doesn’t believe this. John believes that the world is old, very old, and that, quite obviously, Jesus didn’t really mean this when he said this 3,500 years ago to Moses. No, despite the disciple John’s and the apostle Paul’s unequivocal statements that in Christ “all things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made”, despite Christ Himself revealing exactly how long he took to bring the earth into existence, the principal of Moore College, on the contrary, believes that this is just not true. John’s training is in geology and I can only guess that that is where he finds his “intellectual” crutch in order to theologically reinterpret Jesus’ own words to Moses.
I shouldn’t be too severe on John. He does manage, however, to take Jesus’ words seriously, somewhat. At the end of his emphatic statement that the whole Bible serves to witness to Christ, he inserts the textual support for this claim. Bizarrely it’s John 5:39, augmented with an even more emphatic exclamation mark. This verse, as you recall, is Jesus’ own supporting argument to His claim He is from God, namely, that the Old Testament does indeed testify to this. But what is conveniently, and ironically, missing from John Woodhouse’s argument is that Jesus goes on to claim that it was Moses who wrote about Him. Furthermore, Jesus claims that if you don’t believe Moses’ words about Jesus, you won’t believe Jesus’ words about Himself. So, Moses said, after speaking with, in all likelihood, the Creator Jesus, that Jesus took 6 days to create the earth. Moore College argues that this is not what Moses meant. It then goes out into the world (weren’t they spotted standing almost inside St Andrew’s the other week trying to “evangelise”?) and argues with non-believers that it doesn’t really matter what you believe about Moses’ meaning here because you should just believe Jesus died for you.
It’s a very simple formula Jesus put forward: If you don’t believe Moses, you’ll find it incredibly difficult to believe that Jesus said, and meant, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Teach people a pagan, atheistic philosophy that God incomprehensibly used chance, death and time to create, and then expect them to believe that out of His complete love for us, He died for us, they’ll think you’re fools. And rightly so!
God’s judgement is now upon the Sydney Anglican Diocese. Not only has its leaders committed adultery, but it even has allowed itself to follow the vilest principles of secularism by borrowing money to play the stock exchange. It has lost millions. But it doesn’t end there. Taking its lead from the cold brutality of the corporate business world, it sacks people while its clergy continue on the same salary. Yet it expects to “Connect” with the lost!
“This says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: ‘Behold, I will bring on this city and on all her towns all the doom that I have pronounced against it, because they have stiffened their necks that they might not hear my words.” (Jeremiah 19:15)
‘Thus says the LORD:
“Stand in the ways and see,
And ask for the old paths,
where the good way is,
And walk in it;
Then you will find rest for your souls.
But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
“And they have caused themselves to
stumble in their ways,
From the ancient paths,
To walk in pathways
And not on a highway.” (Jeremiah 6:16;18:15)
From the present’s obvious vantage point of being able to peer backwards to the distant past, I’ve often wondered why Israel found it so difficult to appropriately respond to God. Israel did believe in a “God”, of sorts. They understood that the world was created. The people understood that it wasn’t eternal or that it hadn’t just popped into existence from and because of nothing. That much is clear. But why did Israel, time and time again, take the wrong paths?
“How can you say, ‘We are wise,
And the law of the Lord is with us’?
Look, the false pen of the scribe
Certainly works falsehood.” (Jeremiah 8:8)
The prophets, repeatedly, spelled out the solution. It was clearly a product of leadership and these “God-appointed” men giving the wrong information. This specious knowledge didn’t suddenly appear one day, causeless, whole, a take-it-or-leave-it package, but incrementally worked its way into the general consciousness of the people through, and what was generally regarded as innocuous, alterations in revelation. I can almost hear the priests discussing it to the lay person: “Look, trust us. Aren’t we Kohenim, God’s elect. What’s it matter if you believe this? After all, isn’t the main focus of our nation to be on the fact that Moses rescued us from the yoke of the Egyptians? As long as you believe that God saved us, then the rest is secondary. Be reassured that the writers of sacred Scripture never meant that it should be taken so dogmatically as you suggest it should. A little bit of give between the text and reader is to be expected in our enlightened age. I wouldn’t have spent all those years studying at Jerusalem to be wrong on this.” Yes, I can very well imagine such self-serving justification.
Their fundamental error was to replace God and His revelation with themselves as the epistemological nub of their spirituality:
“For my people have committed two evils:
They have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters,
And hewn themselves cisterns – broken
cisterns that can hold no water.” (Jeremiah 2:13)
Once you substitute God as foundational for knowledge, anything and everything is up for grabs. We should be entirely faithful to God when His Spirit has spoken and we should intellectually honestly deal with that information. Too often people obstinately ignore God’s revelation and turn to another in order to form their understanding of the world.
“Why then has this people slidden back,
Jerusalem, in a perpetual backsliding?
They hold fast to deceit,
They refuse to return.
I listened and heard,
But they do not speak aright.
No man repented of his wickedness,
Saying, ‘What have I done?’
Everyone turned to his own course,
As the horse rushes into the battle.” (Jeremiah 8:5,6)
The other morning an acquaintance visited a local Anglican church. The minister and he had previously spoken by phone about Disconnect ’09 and conversation had immediately turned to the great miracle of creation. Some time later he had walked into the church to pass on an article about the genre of Genesis 1. The minister wasn’t there but his assistant was. Again, rather quickly, they began discussing Genesis 1. My friend pointed out to the young and recently graduated Moorite that he had misidentified historical prose as ahistorical poetry. The young man believed, among other things, that if a piece of writing contains repetition then necessarily it can’t be historical narrative. It was pointed out that on the contrary there is plenty of well-known ancient “secular” historiography containing this literary device. His reply was perhaps the most astounding my friend, or indeed I, have ever heard from a Moorite: “You are arrogant because you ignore the findings of postmodernism’s critique of modernism.”
There you have it: the words of wisdom from 4 years of what I can only label ‘brainwashing’ from an institution that is supposedly serving as Australia’s theological flagship. That this represents the zenith of critical thinking is hardly reassuring. Apparently, the best they can offer is to argue that my friend should throw away his personal relationship with God, in which he attentively allows God, the author of Scripture, to speak to his mind, and instead substitute his own intellect to be the basis for and interpreter of truth. The postmodern project says that the author is dead, allowing the reader to puts his meaning - or any other sinner’s or fool’s for that matter - into the text because the author can no longer speak.
And this is why these Moore graduates can look you in the face and tell you that 6 days does not mean 6 days because God’s intended meaning, if indeed He ever had one, has a shelf-life that has long expired. God, in as much as He is the author of His Word, is silent. If He is silent, then it follows that it is up to us to “discover” what happened at the very beginning.
“Cursed is the man who trusts in man
And makes flesh his strength,
Whose mind departs from the LORD.” (Jeremiah 17:5)
What in fact is happening is that these people are replacing God at the epistemological centre of the search for truth with an ersatz, with an idol of the mind. These people – and first-hand experience bears this out - are no longer approachable by reason because they have forsaken reason and committed adultery with another nation’s gods. Gods do not have to be a physical representation but are more likely to be, and considerably more harmful if they are, the way we think and whom we intellectually rely on.
“For it is the land of carved images,
And they are insane with their idols.” (Jeremiah 50:38)
The other story occurred at a University of NSW New College function. The speaker, a neo-natal expert from Britain and ostensibly a conservative, presented a lecture on ethics, abortion and biogenetic manipulation. In conversation afterwards he explained how he had complete faith in the scientific project, God’s revelation wasn’t perspicuous and that he was free to hold to a long age view of origins. It was pointed out to him that all of the miracles of the Bible were done in no time and perfectly, yet the biggest miracle, creation, according to his own view, was exceedingly slow and error-ridden. Ignoring all reason that instantaneity and perfection are how our minds recognise God’s miraculous working in nature, he shrugged his shoulders, smiled politely, and excused himself.
Clearly, all his mind’s thoughts had not been made captive to Christ and is a perfect example of a Christian’s outlook being directed by a foreign idol, in this case, the secular Enlightenment project. This philosophical approach splits up the things of faith and the things of science, thereby, in the case of the latter, promoting an independent, God-free epistemology in which the Lord is not all in all.
In August’s Southern Cross Moore College’s principal John Woodhouse makes an extraordinary sales pitch for the college. His first supporting argument is the “godliness” of its teachers. Until I read John’s comments I’d never realised in my nearly 30 years of being Christian that it was another man’s “godliness” that we are to set our sights upon, particularly upon those same men, whom John held up as paradigms of virtue, who would also read John’s article. I’d always thought that “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” and that it was Christ’s holiness that we are to be subject to. Maybe I’ve missed something from these teachers of God’s law.
But even more alarming (is that possible?!) is John’s outrageous hypocrisy. Quite incredibly he delusionally argues that Moore has a “worldwide reputation for teaching how the whole Bible and all of its parts bear witness to Christ.” John’s italics here serve as a comedic self-parody. If John actually believed that, he would understand the Gospel and Christ’s first office of Creator; but he doesn’t. Christ clearly tells us in Exodus 31 that He “made the heavens and the earth in 6 days”, and John just doesn’t believe this. John believes that the world is old, very old, and that, quite obviously, Jesus didn’t really mean this when he said this 3,500 years ago to Moses. No, despite the disciple John’s and the apostle Paul’s unequivocal statements that in Christ “all things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made”, despite Christ Himself revealing exactly how long he took to bring the earth into existence, the principal of Moore College, on the contrary, believes that this is just not true. John’s training is in geology and I can only guess that that is where he finds his “intellectual” crutch in order to theologically reinterpret Jesus’ own words to Moses.
I shouldn’t be too severe on John. He does manage, however, to take Jesus’ words seriously, somewhat. At the end of his emphatic statement that the whole Bible serves to witness to Christ, he inserts the textual support for this claim. Bizarrely it’s John 5:39, augmented with an even more emphatic exclamation mark. This verse, as you recall, is Jesus’ own supporting argument to His claim He is from God, namely, that the Old Testament does indeed testify to this. But what is conveniently, and ironically, missing from John Woodhouse’s argument is that Jesus goes on to claim that it was Moses who wrote about Him. Furthermore, Jesus claims that if you don’t believe Moses’ words about Jesus, you won’t believe Jesus’ words about Himself. So, Moses said, after speaking with, in all likelihood, the Creator Jesus, that Jesus took 6 days to create the earth. Moore College argues that this is not what Moses meant. It then goes out into the world (weren’t they spotted standing almost inside St Andrew’s the other week trying to “evangelise”?) and argues with non-believers that it doesn’t really matter what you believe about Moses’ meaning here because you should just believe Jesus died for you.
It’s a very simple formula Jesus put forward: If you don’t believe Moses, you’ll find it incredibly difficult to believe that Jesus said, and meant, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Teach people a pagan, atheistic philosophy that God incomprehensibly used chance, death and time to create, and then expect them to believe that out of His complete love for us, He died for us, they’ll think you’re fools. And rightly so!
God’s judgement is now upon the Sydney Anglican Diocese. Not only has its leaders committed adultery, but it even has allowed itself to follow the vilest principles of secularism by borrowing money to play the stock exchange. It has lost millions. But it doesn’t end there. Taking its lead from the cold brutality of the corporate business world, it sacks people while its clergy continue on the same salary. Yet it expects to “Connect” with the lost!
“This says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: ‘Behold, I will bring on this city and on all her towns all the doom that I have pronounced against it, because they have stiffened their necks that they might not hear my words.” (Jeremiah 19:15)
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Question for Biblical Creationists, Sydney Anglican Diocese and Church of England - "Why Were Our Reformers Burned?"
Why were our Reformers burned?
The question was raised by Bishop J. C. Ryle in his book "Light From Old Times" published in 1890. In fact, he devoted a whole chapter to the question.
In general, those Reformers burned at the stake were resistant to the Church of England going back from where it came - to Roman Catholicism. The time was the reign of Queen Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Arragon. Mary (or "Bloody Mary") had been brought up a staunch Roman Catholic. Upon ascendancy to the Crown she set about bringing down all that had been achieved by the Reformers.
It was not enough to change the order of services, reinstate the Mass, banish foreign Protestants from England and prohibit the writings of key Reformers. From early 1555 Protestants were targeted and, under threat to life, were ordered to recant principles of the Reformation. There was staunch resistance and, while statistics vary, a conservative count shows 288 Protestants were burned at the stake between 1555 and 1558 for refusing to recant.
In his chapter "Why Were Our Reformers Burned?" Bishop Ryle looks at leading Reformers of the day to answer the question for all. John Rogers, Anglican Minister in London; John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester; Rowland Taylor, Rector of Hadleigh; Robert Ferar, Bishop of St David's, Wales; John Bradford, Chaplain to Bishop Ridley; Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London; Hugh Latimer, once Bishop of Worcester; John Philpot, Archdeacon of Winchester; Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury; are each examined.
Each may have had additional charges pertaining to the Reformation laid against them but, according to Bishop Ryle, "The principal reason why they were burned was because they refused one of the peculiar doctrines of the Romish Church. On that doctrine, in almost every case, hinged their life or death. If they admitted it they might live; if they refused it, they must die."
The doctrine in question was the real presence [transubstantiation] of the body and blood of Christ in the consecrated elements of bread and wine in the Lord's Supper."
If the Reformers declared that our Lord Jesus Christ was bodily present in the bread and wine they would live. If they refused they were burned by faggot.
In an act he later regretted, Thomas Cranmer recanted but such was the hatred of his enemies toward him that they went ahead with his burning. This afforded Cranmer a glorious opportunity to triumph for he withdrew his recantation and thrust the hand with which he signed the recantation into the flame while uttering the words "This unworthy right hand." He then steadily lifted his left hand toward heaven. Bishop Ryle also provides as a footnote a comment attested by Soames and other historians that "when the fire had had burned down to ashes, Cranmer's heart was found unconsumed and uninjured."
Transubstantiation or Real Presence - why were the Reformers so dogged in rejecting it, even to death? After all, isn't the Gospel all that matters and isn't Romans 10:9 ("That if you confess with mouth, 'Jesus is Lord' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.") a summary of that Gospel? Isn't it possible that Jesus Christ, our Creator in Spirit and Flesh could somehow be bodily present in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper - remember when amongst His disciples he turned a small amount of bread into a multitude of bread and, on another occasion, turned mere water into fermented wine. Couldn't He do something mighty and beyond earthly understanding with the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper? Why get hung up on a point such as this? Wouldn't it have been better for peace and harmony to just accept the doctrine of Transubstantiation or Real Presence? To accept it meant survival and the opportunity to go about the nation sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Doesn't this make sense?
Bishop Ryle provides the answer to all the foregoing questions on page 45 of his book:
"Whatever men please to think or say, the Romish doctrine of the Real Presence, if pursued to its legitimate consequences, obscures every leading doctrine of the Gospel, and damages and interferes with the whole system of Christ's truth. Grant for a moment that the Lord's Supper is a sacrifice and not a sacrament ... [and all the contingencies of the Real Presence]- You spoil the blessed doctrine of Christ's finished work when he died on the cross. A sacrifice that needs to be repeated is not a perfect and complete thing. - You spoil the priestly office of Christ. If there are priests that can offer an acceptable sacrifice to God besides Him, the great High Priest is robbed of His glory. - You spoil the Scriptural doctrine of the Christian ministry. You exalt sinful men into the position of mediators between God and man. - You give to the sacramental elements of bread and wine an honour and veneration they were never meant to receive and produce an idolatry to be abhorred of faithful Christians. - Last, but not least, you overthrow the true doctrine of Christ's human nature. If the body born of the Virgin Mary can be in more places than one at the same time, it is not a body like our own, and Jesus was not 'the second Adam' in the truth of our nature." [emphasis mine]
So there you have the reasons why Reformers were prepared to die. There were legitimate consequences of the doctrine of the Real Presence which obscured every leading doctrine of the Gospel while damaging and interfering with the whole truth of Christ Jesus.
Would the people of influence in the Church of England today and the Sydney Anglican Diocese have the conviction and courage of the Reformers to resist, to death, the doctrine of the Real Presence or Transubstantiation? If talk means anything, I suspect those in Sydney Anglican Diocese would be saying "Yes" at this point. I don't know enough about those in the Church of England to comment on how they would respond.
Let me now make life a little uncomfortable for those same people.
For most of your Christian life you have taken all means to avoid Biblical Creationists who first gently called you back to Scripture concerning the Creation account but who, on occasions, have become antagonistic at your repeated avoidance and failure to relate. Biblical Creationists are one with the Reformers on the subject of the Creation account because both have read Genesis 1 as implying each of the six days of Creation were of 24 hours and the age of the earth amounts to something near 6,000 years.
You have become selective in your reading of Scripture and selective in those who you listen to on the subject of the Creation event. Having admired and given assent to those Reformers who resisted the odious doctrine of the Real Presence to point of death, are you selective in how you apply the criteria of those Reformers when it comes to the subject of the Creation event?
Theistic Evolution, which you hold dear, is an odious doctrine. By embracing that doctrine - you spoil Christ's finished work of Creation completed as "very good" on day six as Gen 1:31, Gen 2:2 and Ex 20:11 make clear (John 5:17 refers to God working continuously post-Fall and cannot be applied here). - You spoil Christ's office as Creator by applying to Him a faltering, dead-end, mutation and death filled process of Creation. You rob Him of His glory as Creator. - You spoil the doctrine of authority of Scripture (or Word of God) by exalting sinful men to knowledge of origins to subjugation of the inspired writing of Moses. In so doing you engage in idolatry. - Last, but not least, you overthrow the true doctrine of the righteousness of Christ by asserting He created by causing the weak to suffer and die for the strong (natural selection) which is a complete reversal of His nature expressed in Law, Teaching, Redemptive Work and Person. In your doctrine, death is not an enemy which invaded the created order through sin. It is simply an outworking of the Nature of Christ before and after Creation and therefore no reason for Him to take on flesh to redeem the Creation by dying on the Cross.
With appropriate adjustment for your offence I repeat Bishop Ryle: "Whatever men please to think or say, the [worldly doctrine of Theistic Evolution], if pursued to its legitimate consequences, obscures every leading doctrine of the Gospel, and damages and interferes with the whole system of Christ's truth." [emphasis mine]
The Reformers saw the doctrine of the Real Presence as heresy. The same charge applies to the doctrine of Theistic Evolution. This then gives cause for some tough questions:
1) Isn't the Gospel, in all its strength, something more than a simple, tract-like presentation that is commonly offered today?
2) Would Biblical Creationists today be prepared to resist, to the point of death, the doctrine of Theistic Evolution?
3) Would the Sydney Anglican Diocese or the Church of England be prepared to persecute or sit idly by while the world persecuted, to the point of death, Biblical Creationists who by another label are "fundamentalists"?
4) How long will the Sydney Anglican Diocese and the Church of England give succour to practitioners of the heresy of Theistic Evolution?
Neil
The question was raised by Bishop J. C. Ryle in his book "Light From Old Times" published in 1890. In fact, he devoted a whole chapter to the question.
In general, those Reformers burned at the stake were resistant to the Church of England going back from where it came - to Roman Catholicism. The time was the reign of Queen Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Arragon. Mary (or "Bloody Mary") had been brought up a staunch Roman Catholic. Upon ascendancy to the Crown she set about bringing down all that had been achieved by the Reformers.
It was not enough to change the order of services, reinstate the Mass, banish foreign Protestants from England and prohibit the writings of key Reformers. From early 1555 Protestants were targeted and, under threat to life, were ordered to recant principles of the Reformation. There was staunch resistance and, while statistics vary, a conservative count shows 288 Protestants were burned at the stake between 1555 and 1558 for refusing to recant.
In his chapter "Why Were Our Reformers Burned?" Bishop Ryle looks at leading Reformers of the day to answer the question for all. John Rogers, Anglican Minister in London; John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester; Rowland Taylor, Rector of Hadleigh; Robert Ferar, Bishop of St David's, Wales; John Bradford, Chaplain to Bishop Ridley; Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London; Hugh Latimer, once Bishop of Worcester; John Philpot, Archdeacon of Winchester; Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury; are each examined.
Each may have had additional charges pertaining to the Reformation laid against them but, according to Bishop Ryle, "The principal reason why they were burned was because they refused one of the peculiar doctrines of the Romish Church. On that doctrine, in almost every case, hinged their life or death. If they admitted it they might live; if they refused it, they must die."
The doctrine in question was the real presence [transubstantiation] of the body and blood of Christ in the consecrated elements of bread and wine in the Lord's Supper."
If the Reformers declared that our Lord Jesus Christ was bodily present in the bread and wine they would live. If they refused they were burned by faggot.
In an act he later regretted, Thomas Cranmer recanted but such was the hatred of his enemies toward him that they went ahead with his burning. This afforded Cranmer a glorious opportunity to triumph for he withdrew his recantation and thrust the hand with which he signed the recantation into the flame while uttering the words "This unworthy right hand." He then steadily lifted his left hand toward heaven. Bishop Ryle also provides as a footnote a comment attested by Soames and other historians that "when the fire had had burned down to ashes, Cranmer's heart was found unconsumed and uninjured."
Transubstantiation or Real Presence - why were the Reformers so dogged in rejecting it, even to death? After all, isn't the Gospel all that matters and isn't Romans 10:9 ("That if you confess with mouth, 'Jesus is Lord' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.") a summary of that Gospel? Isn't it possible that Jesus Christ, our Creator in Spirit and Flesh could somehow be bodily present in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper - remember when amongst His disciples he turned a small amount of bread into a multitude of bread and, on another occasion, turned mere water into fermented wine. Couldn't He do something mighty and beyond earthly understanding with the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper? Why get hung up on a point such as this? Wouldn't it have been better for peace and harmony to just accept the doctrine of Transubstantiation or Real Presence? To accept it meant survival and the opportunity to go about the nation sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Doesn't this make sense?
Bishop Ryle provides the answer to all the foregoing questions on page 45 of his book:
"Whatever men please to think or say, the Romish doctrine of the Real Presence, if pursued to its legitimate consequences, obscures every leading doctrine of the Gospel, and damages and interferes with the whole system of Christ's truth. Grant for a moment that the Lord's Supper is a sacrifice and not a sacrament ... [and all the contingencies of the Real Presence]- You spoil the blessed doctrine of Christ's finished work when he died on the cross. A sacrifice that needs to be repeated is not a perfect and complete thing. - You spoil the priestly office of Christ. If there are priests that can offer an acceptable sacrifice to God besides Him, the great High Priest is robbed of His glory. - You spoil the Scriptural doctrine of the Christian ministry. You exalt sinful men into the position of mediators between God and man. - You give to the sacramental elements of bread and wine an honour and veneration they were never meant to receive and produce an idolatry to be abhorred of faithful Christians. - Last, but not least, you overthrow the true doctrine of Christ's human nature. If the body born of the Virgin Mary can be in more places than one at the same time, it is not a body like our own, and Jesus was not 'the second Adam' in the truth of our nature." [emphasis mine]
So there you have the reasons why Reformers were prepared to die. There were legitimate consequences of the doctrine of the Real Presence which obscured every leading doctrine of the Gospel while damaging and interfering with the whole truth of Christ Jesus.
Would the people of influence in the Church of England today and the Sydney Anglican Diocese have the conviction and courage of the Reformers to resist, to death, the doctrine of the Real Presence or Transubstantiation? If talk means anything, I suspect those in Sydney Anglican Diocese would be saying "Yes" at this point. I don't know enough about those in the Church of England to comment on how they would respond.
Let me now make life a little uncomfortable for those same people.
For most of your Christian life you have taken all means to avoid Biblical Creationists who first gently called you back to Scripture concerning the Creation account but who, on occasions, have become antagonistic at your repeated avoidance and failure to relate. Biblical Creationists are one with the Reformers on the subject of the Creation account because both have read Genesis 1 as implying each of the six days of Creation were of 24 hours and the age of the earth amounts to something near 6,000 years.
You have become selective in your reading of Scripture and selective in those who you listen to on the subject of the Creation event. Having admired and given assent to those Reformers who resisted the odious doctrine of the Real Presence to point of death, are you selective in how you apply the criteria of those Reformers when it comes to the subject of the Creation event?
Theistic Evolution, which you hold dear, is an odious doctrine. By embracing that doctrine - you spoil Christ's finished work of Creation completed as "very good" on day six as Gen 1:31, Gen 2:2 and Ex 20:11 make clear (John 5:17 refers to God working continuously post-Fall and cannot be applied here). - You spoil Christ's office as Creator by applying to Him a faltering, dead-end, mutation and death filled process of Creation. You rob Him of His glory as Creator. - You spoil the doctrine of authority of Scripture (or Word of God) by exalting sinful men to knowledge of origins to subjugation of the inspired writing of Moses. In so doing you engage in idolatry. - Last, but not least, you overthrow the true doctrine of the righteousness of Christ by asserting He created by causing the weak to suffer and die for the strong (natural selection) which is a complete reversal of His nature expressed in Law, Teaching, Redemptive Work and Person. In your doctrine, death is not an enemy which invaded the created order through sin. It is simply an outworking of the Nature of Christ before and after Creation and therefore no reason for Him to take on flesh to redeem the Creation by dying on the Cross.
With appropriate adjustment for your offence I repeat Bishop Ryle: "Whatever men please to think or say, the [worldly doctrine of Theistic Evolution], if pursued to its legitimate consequences, obscures every leading doctrine of the Gospel, and damages and interferes with the whole system of Christ's truth." [emphasis mine]
The Reformers saw the doctrine of the Real Presence as heresy. The same charge applies to the doctrine of Theistic Evolution. This then gives cause for some tough questions:
1) Isn't the Gospel, in all its strength, something more than a simple, tract-like presentation that is commonly offered today?
2) Would Biblical Creationists today be prepared to resist, to the point of death, the doctrine of Theistic Evolution?
3) Would the Sydney Anglican Diocese or the Church of England be prepared to persecute or sit idly by while the world persecuted, to the point of death, Biblical Creationists who by another label are "fundamentalists"?
4) How long will the Sydney Anglican Diocese and the Church of England give succour to practitioners of the heresy of Theistic Evolution?
Neil
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Sydney Episcopalian Diocese Exposed
When Episcopalian Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen and adherents propose evolution as the means by which God created what are they saying?
In spite of what complimentary biblical accounts Gen 1, Ex 20:11 and Ex 31:17 record of the creation of the world, these latter day interpreters propose some creative means far and away in contradistinction. Indeed, to propose as they do they must force the texts to say something that the texts clearly do not say. So what is it that Archbishop Jensen and others are saying?
How do we interpret the actions of those who promote themselves to the world as being guardians of evangelicalism and rigorous defenders of the integrity of Scripture? What are we to make of those who on issues such as ordination of women, marriage, adultery, homosexuality, leadership of the Church, stand against the world in applying a straightforward reading of Scripture yet force Scripture on the issue of origins so as to accommodate the world's view?
There is only one conclusion to be drawn but a little background is helpful in the first instance.
Evangelicals through the generations have at least one thing in common. They will not consciously trifle with God. They are respecters of God, even fearers of God. When God speaks they listen. Consider your uneasiness when reading of Moses inciting the anger of God by baulking at God's request to lead Israel in contest with Pharaoh (Ex 4:13-14) or Job's encounter with angered God (Job 38:1-3 and 40:1-2). From where I sit the Sydney Episcopalian Diocese appears to hold the same fear of God and, on issues I've mentioned already regarding Church order, they have acted with reverence.
So what is going on with the issue of origins? Our Lord Jesus Christ alludes to what is going on when he says "A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master." (Matt 10:24-25) Well then, we need only look to the teacher and master of Archbishop Jensen and adherents on origins - Charles Darwin.
On 24 November 1880 Charles Darwin wrote to Frederick McDermott and said "I am sorry to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God." Charles Darwin's erroneous perception of the order of life took him from being a candidate for 'Cure of Souls' to rejecting Scripture as divine revelation. This then exposes the position of Archbishop Jensen and adherents. They do not regard Gen 1, Ex 20:11 and Ex 31:17 as being divine revelation. They cannot, otherwise they would respond with reverence and acceptance of what God is saying. Instead their reverence and acceptance is toward Charles Darwin inasmuch as they honour his mechanism albeit with God superimposed over the mechanism.
What else are we to conclude but that Archbishop Jensen and adherents accept some Scripture as divine revelation but not all Scripture. Those passages of Scripture which, by straightforward reading, present God, through Jesus Christ, creating the heavens, the earth, the sea and all that is in them in six days (as we experience days) only thousands of years ago are not, according to Archbishop Jensen and adherents, divine revelation. In all all honesty, they wouldn't tamper with it if it were, in their mind, divine revelation would they?
This is a sad revelation which, unless sufficiently corrected by Archbishop Jensen and adherents, must stand.
I invite Archbishop Jensen to correct my perception of the situation if I am in error or repent of this heresy.
In spite of what complimentary biblical accounts Gen 1, Ex 20:11 and Ex 31:17 record of the creation of the world, these latter day interpreters propose some creative means far and away in contradistinction. Indeed, to propose as they do they must force the texts to say something that the texts clearly do not say. So what is it that Archbishop Jensen and others are saying?
How do we interpret the actions of those who promote themselves to the world as being guardians of evangelicalism and rigorous defenders of the integrity of Scripture? What are we to make of those who on issues such as ordination of women, marriage, adultery, homosexuality, leadership of the Church, stand against the world in applying a straightforward reading of Scripture yet force Scripture on the issue of origins so as to accommodate the world's view?
There is only one conclusion to be drawn but a little background is helpful in the first instance.
Evangelicals through the generations have at least one thing in common. They will not consciously trifle with God. They are respecters of God, even fearers of God. When God speaks they listen. Consider your uneasiness when reading of Moses inciting the anger of God by baulking at God's request to lead Israel in contest with Pharaoh (Ex 4:13-14) or Job's encounter with angered God (Job 38:1-3 and 40:1-2). From where I sit the Sydney Episcopalian Diocese appears to hold the same fear of God and, on issues I've mentioned already regarding Church order, they have acted with reverence.
So what is going on with the issue of origins? Our Lord Jesus Christ alludes to what is going on when he says "A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for the student to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master." (Matt 10:24-25) Well then, we need only look to the teacher and master of Archbishop Jensen and adherents on origins - Charles Darwin.
On 24 November 1880 Charles Darwin wrote to Frederick McDermott and said "I am sorry to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God." Charles Darwin's erroneous perception of the order of life took him from being a candidate for 'Cure of Souls' to rejecting Scripture as divine revelation. This then exposes the position of Archbishop Jensen and adherents. They do not regard Gen 1, Ex 20:11 and Ex 31:17 as being divine revelation. They cannot, otherwise they would respond with reverence and acceptance of what God is saying. Instead their reverence and acceptance is toward Charles Darwin inasmuch as they honour his mechanism albeit with God superimposed over the mechanism.
What else are we to conclude but that Archbishop Jensen and adherents accept some Scripture as divine revelation but not all Scripture. Those passages of Scripture which, by straightforward reading, present God, through Jesus Christ, creating the heavens, the earth, the sea and all that is in them in six days (as we experience days) only thousands of years ago are not, according to Archbishop Jensen and adherents, divine revelation. In all all honesty, they wouldn't tamper with it if it were, in their mind, divine revelation would they?
This is a sad revelation which, unless sufficiently corrected by Archbishop Jensen and adherents, must stand.
I invite Archbishop Jensen to correct my perception of the situation if I am in error or repent of this heresy.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Do the Sydney Anglican Heretics successfully wrest the epistemological highground from orthodoxy?
To all concerned, sorry for the delay but I have had to attend to some fairly urgent matters of health recently and this has eaten up my spare time. My mother, very early on, and doctor, most recently warned me about the dangers of reinserting my navel fluff. And now I reap the consequences.
1. I believe the following is a fair representation of Anonymous’ case against me.
a. I offered Kay’s paper as proof and argued that literary devices don’t
negate the claim of a passage to being history.
b. Dickson proposed the inclusion of so many literary devices means
Genesis 1 isn’t history.
c. I overlooked the subtlety of Dickson’s argument.
d. I‘m dumb as it’s not true truth.
e. QED, Dickson’s case is subtle and accurate.
f. Genesis 1 isn’t an historical report because of the large number of
literary devices
g. It is right to say that Kay’s case lacks a strong and sharp disproof to
Dickson’s thesis that Genesis is non-history.
2. To refresh everyone’s memory what Dickson wrote: “Genesis 1…is composed in a style quite different from the ‘historical narrative’ of, say, the Gospels in their accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, for instance…Genesis 1, on the other hand, is not written in the style we normally associate with historical report. It is difficult even to describe the passage as prose. The original Hebrew of this passage is marked by intricate structure, rhythm, parallelism, chiasmus, repetition and the lavish use of number symbolism. These features are not observed together in those parts of the Bible we recognize as historical prose…I will, however, draw attention to the number symbolism present in our passage. [John gives a number of examples of the number 7 and its multiples in the text and then concludes with] The artistry of the chapter is stunning and, to ancient readers, unmistakable. It casts the creation as a work of art, sharing in the perfection of God and deriving from him. My point is obvious: short of including a prescript for the benefit of modern readers the original author could hardly have made it clearer that his message is being conveyed through literary rather than prosaic means.”
So, clearly Dickson is saying from “the lavish use of number[s]” alone that one can conclude Genesis 1 is not historiography. I’ll address this in a moment but, as you stated elsewhere, what’s good for a goose is good for the gander, and so I think it was entirely reasonable for me to argue (as Kay had in his paper) that individually these literary devices do not necessarily convey non-history.
Furthermore, as you have implied, these devices are found in historiographic passages. (Although, Dickson, by not actually exploring this “incidental” detail, seems hell-bent on not providing examples for the reader so they can at least make up their own mind as to the strength of his case. After all, if, for example, a clearly historiographic section of one of the Gospels were to contain several literary devices, I would assume that even the most zealously sycophantic of Dickson’s backers would be less inclined to argue for the soundness of his thesis. Hmmm, maybe not so on second thought, given their hitherto lending of unconditional support for just about any old excuse that maintains their obduracy and love of heresy) I would obviously concur. So the problem for you and Dickson is this: If the inclusion of one device does not in and of itself transform historiography to non-historiography, and the addition of another similarly doesn’t, and another etc etc don’t, why would the inclusion of all 6 suddenly tip the scale? If you reply that this “uniqueness” is the very characteristic that does turn historiography to non-historiography, isn’t that just simply a case of question-begging? Wouldn’t one need to provide several examples from other sources, particularly non-biblical ones, which demonstrate the soundness of this proposition?
Looking at it in a not entirely different way, Dickson has tacitly stated that, all other things being equal,
(i) 1 Literary Device = Historiography,
(ii) LD+LD = Historiography
(iii) LD+LD+LD = Historiography
(iv) LD+LD+LD+LD = Historiography
and
(v) LD+LD+LD+LD+LD = Historiography
yet he contends that
LD+LD+LD+LD+LD+LD ≠ Historiography
I am at a loss how 1,2,3,4, or even 5 pluses add up to a plus but an additional 6th makes it a zero. Along with destroying biblical facts, you guys seem to have the same menacing attitude to maths. This reminds me of Dallas Willard’s comment: “[U]nsound arguments are not to be expected by their collective force to prove a conclusion which none can establish by themselves."
3. So since you’ve admitted that literary devices are utilised by the author in historiography, where does Dickson (and you) draw the cut-off line? It seems that since these devices are everywhere, in historical prose and poetry alike, then the answer must be, “Well, anywhere I damn well please!” This of course demonstrates the arbitrary nature of your argument. That, putatively, these devices only appear in such numbers in Genesis 1 and no where else is not the clincher you imagine it to be. After all, breathing over its neck is a passage of historical narrative that has one less literary device. If none of the ancients were bothered with their inclusion why should we listen to Dickson and a nobody called Anonymous. All this to me seems like something new to tickle those who are easily dissuaded from the plain, straightforward, uncomplicated historical truth of the first page of God’s revelation to us. That the common ploughboy has never seen this wolf-in-sheep’s clothing “truth” you’re presently serving up to the Church only strengthens our resolve to root you heretics out.
4. While we are on the subject, I’d like to point out that neither Dickson nor Anon never actually identify where these literary devices appear in the text. I suppose we’re to just take their word that all 6 actually appear in Genesis.
So, would either of these two heretics (or the Dickson sycophants over in the Sydney Diocese) change their view if just one of the mooted devices didn’t appear in Genesis 1? That is, based on Dickson’s thesis, if the sum total of these devices were 5, would these heretics accept Genesis 1 as history or can nothing falsify Dickson’s proposition?
5. Just on this issue, a few years ago an Israeli Oxford Hebraist academic informed me that sustained rhythm, the type that non-prose should contain if it does have rhythm, is not in Genesis 1. What rhythm there is, is far too brief to be important and is a chance by-product of speech in general. In other words, one would be drawing a really long bow to claim that rhythm is a salient literary device in Genesis 1.
6. But just to fulfil my epistemic obligation, let me provide you with a few passages where there is a preponderance of literary devices. To make it easier for me I’ll be borrowing considerably from Dickson’s paper.
The Flood Narrative
It is well known that in Hebrew thought the number 8 symbolises new beginnings, resurrection or regeneration and 13 betrayal. A well-known example for the former is many baptismal fonts are eight-sided, as is the baptismal cross, while the latter is the number of people at the Last Supper.
In the narrative of Noah, which contains the Flood account, multiples of 8 appear in extraordinary ways. For ancient readers, who were accustomed to taking notice of such things, these multiples of 8 conveyed a powerful message. Its omnipresence in many chapters of the Bible makes an unmistakable point about the ultimate authorship of the Bible itself. Consider the following in this account:
a. The “berit” (covenant) stem appears 8 times
b. The number of people saved on the ark was 8
c. The sign of the covenant, “qeshet” (rainbow) has a numerical value in Hebrew
of 800
d. The Flood was 40 days (i.e. 5 x 8) upon the earth
e. Noah waited another 40 days until he opened the window
f. He then sent out a raven, numerical value 272 (i.e. 8 x 32)
g. Noah’s name is occasionally spelled with a vav and thus his name has a
numerical value of 64 i.e. 8 x 8
h. From Adam to Noah’s Flood there were 1656 (207 x 8) years
And btw,
i. Indeed, Jesus’ very name in Greek numerical values has the value of 888,
which also equals in Hebrew Yeshoth Elohenu i.e. Our God’s Salvation
j. Jesus appeared to Thomas on the 8th day
k. Pistis (faith) has the same numerical value as Kurios (Lord) i.e. 800
As to the number 7,
a. The clean beasts were taken on in lots of seven
b. Assuming 30 days in a lunar month, the fountains of the deep were broken up
on the 2nd month, 17th day of Noah’s 600th year i.e. the 77th day
c. The Ark came to rest in the 7th month
d. The tops of the mountains were seen on the first day of the 10th month i.e. (
10 x 30) +1 = 301 = 43 x 7
e. The seventh occurrence of the name Noah is in Genesis 6:9 and here he is
called ‘perfect’. The Hebrew word here is thammim which has a numerical
value of 490 i.e. 70 x 7
f. The number of times that God spoke to Noah was seven.
Any other literary devices? Sure.
• A play on words: In Hebrew the name ‘Noah’ is an anagram of ‘Grace’. The first appearance of ‘grace’ is in Genesis 6:8: ‘But Noah found grace in the eyes of YHWH’. The numerical value of YHWH is 26. The word ‘grace’ is found in 26 (13 x 2) verses in Torah.
• Parallelism: In Genesis 6:9 "perfect in his generations" acts as a parallel thought to Noah being "a just man."
• Parallelism: In Genesis 7: 6-10, 11-16 this device can be discerned as re-emphasising and enlarging upon the same ideas.
• Chiasmus:
Genesis 7:10 – And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.
Genesis 7:12 - And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.
Genesis 7:24 – The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.
Genesis 8:3 – The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down,
Genesis 8:6 - After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark
Genesis 8:10 - He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark.
Here’s another:
Introduction (6:9-10)
1. Violence on the earth (6:11-12)
2. First speech: intent to destroy earth (6:13-22)
3. Second speech: go into the ark (7:1-10)
4. The Flood starts (7:11-16)
5. The flood rises (7:17-24)
Climax-God remembers Noah (8:1a)
5a. The Flood recedes (8:1b-5)
4a. Drying off of the earth (8:6-14)
3a. Third speech: leave the ark (8:15-19)
2a. Will not destroy earth again (8:20-22)
1a. Fourth speech: the covenant (9:1-17)
Conclusion (9:18-19)
There is a chiastic structure in the genealogy: Noah's sons are listed in this order: Shem, Ham, and Japheth; then they are discussed in reverse order.
• Repetition
(i) The destruction of life
(ii) Establishment of the covenant
(iii) The types of animals on the ark
What then can we at this blog conclude? All of this definitely will convince the heretics in the Sydney Anglo Fun Park that Noah’s story and the Flood specifically are not historical or historiography.
When I previously pointed out that the Flood account contains all the features Dickson has said tell the reader to think ‘non-history/non-historiography’, Anon’s remark was “ROFL.” In fact, Anon went on to suggest these chapters of Genesis were on the sae level as a fairy tale like Goldilocks and the 3 bears.
I suspect Anon will mock my argument, as he has done previously (he poured scorn on my comment and said I had a weak argument when I offered Jesus’ and Peter’s testimonies as proof that the Bible’s account of the Flood should be taken as history), but this behaviour is what one expects from heretics. As we progress through the Bible more and more chapters start to be transformed from historiography to myth or some other liberal nomenclature.
Abraham
• Numbers
a. There are 613 commandments in Torah. Of these 248 are positive and 365 negative. Abraham, the first Jew, was called righteous before God and is regarded as the paradigm of perfection. His name has the number value of 248 (31x 8), the number of positive commandments.
b. The son of Abraham, Yizhak, has 4 letters to his name each with a numerical value of 10, 90, 8 and 100 respectively. The first refers to the 10 commandments, the second to the age of Sarah when he was born, the third, the age at his circumcision and the last to the age of Abraham when he was born. A miracle performed for a mother and father was for the sake of a child who would be circumcised and enter a covenant.
c. Concerning the number 13, circumcision for Ishmael was carried out when he was 13, the word for covenant, berit, is mentioned 13 times in Genesis 17, the chapter which sets out the circumcision command.
d. In Genesis 14:14 there are 318 men who went out to rescue his relative. Interesting, Eliezer the servant of Abraham, the “heir” of Abraham, has a numerical value for his name of 318.
• Chiasmus:
A Display of faith: Abram leaves his homeland; the first promise 11:31–12:3
B Abram sojourns in Canaan 12:4-9
C The stay in Egypt; Abram passes Sarai off as his sister 12:10-20
D The separation of Abram, who has the promise, from Lot, who does not
have the promise 13:1-18
E The rescue of Lot 14:1-24
F Abram’s fears of infertility are allayed by the promise of a
son; God makes a covenant 15:1-21
G Sarai’s attempt to get a son: Ishmael 16:1-16
H THE COVENANT; Abram’s new name,
etc. 17:1-10
G´ Circumcision; the rejection of Ishmael and the
promise of a son through Sarah 17:9-27
F´ Sarah is told of the promise of a son, despite her fears of
infertility 18:1-15
E´ The rescue of Lot 18:16–19:38
D´ The stay in Gerar; Abraham passes Sarah off as his sister 20:1-18
C´ The birth of Isaac; the separation of Isaac, the child of the promise, from
Ishmael, the child outside the promise 21:1-21
B´ Abraham sojourns among the Philistines 21:22-34
A´ Display of faith: Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac; the final promise 22:1-19
And there are chiasms within chiasms. For example, Genesis 12:16 appears as an inventory but has been arranged chiastically. So, if Dickson’s rule is true then Abram’s sheep are not referring to historic sheep but artistic ones.
There are also significant and lavish use of numbers concerning the other patriarchs etc
a. Adam is 130 when he begot Seth and lives another 800 years.
b. Jacob has 1 daughter and 8 sons from his wives and 4 sons from the
shefahot i.e. 13 children.
c. When Jacob’s name is changed to Israel by God, then last time he is called
Jacob is the 130th appearance of Jacob’s name in Torah.
d. Jacob’s age in front of Pharaoh is 130 while Moses was 80
e. The only ages given for Joseph are 17, 30, 110, gaps of 13 and 80
f. Sarah was at her death 127 years old = 100 + 20 + 7. The gaps here are 80
and 13.
g. Circumcision is on the 8th day.
And I am more than sure that if I could be bothered – which I am definitely not – I could find far too many examples of devices which Kay listed in his article, including, parallel plotting with its ostensible appearance of simultaneity, delayed action and outcomes, asymmetrical and ironic juxtapositioning, convergence and retrospective alignment, sequential twists, temporal shifts, the omitting or ambiguating of causal links, temporal gaps and blanks, analogous or repetitive themes and incidents, alternation whereby the narrative sequence zig-zags between objective simultaneities, suspense-driven episodes, deep interlinear polarities of theme, foreclosure or premature curtain-dropping which “jumps ahead” in absolute time in order to synchronize effects, the establishment of contextual hierarchies of importance, shifts in focus, complex word plays, parataxis, and interepisodic suspense.
Matthew’s Gospel
The first 17 verses of the New Testament (The Gospel of Matthew) deals with a single principal subject: the genealogy of Jesus Christ. It contains 72 Greek vocabulary words in these initial 17 versus. The following structures are supposedly found.
• The number of words which are nouns is exactly 56, or 7 x 8. The Greek
word "the" occurs most frequently in the passage: exactly 56 times, or 7 x 8.
• The number of different forms in which the article "the" occurs is exactly 7
• There are two main sections in the passage: verse 1-11 and 12-17. In the
first main section, the number of Greek vocabulary words used is 49, or 7 x 7 Of these 49 words, the number of those beginning with a vowel is 28, or 7 x 4
• The number of words beginning with a consonant is 21, or 7 x 3. The total
number of letters in these 49 words is exactly 266, or 7 x 38-exactly.
• The numbers of vowels among these 266 letters is 140, or 7 x 20. The number
of consonants is 126, or 7 x 18-exactly.
• Of these 49 words, the number of words which occur more than once is 35, or 7 x 5.
• The number of words occurring only once is 14, or 7 x2.
• The number of words which occur in only one form is exactly 42, or 7 x 6.
• The number of words appearing in more than one form is also 7.
• The number of 49 Greek vocabulary words which are nouns is 42, or 7 x 6.
• The number of words which are not nouns is 7.
• Of the nouns, 35 are proper names, or 7 x 5. These 35 nouns are used 63
times, or 7 x 9.
• The number of male names is 28, or 7 x 4. These male names occur 56 times or
7 x 8.
• The number of names which is not male is 7.
• Three women are mentioned-Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth. The number of Greek
letters in these three names is 14, or 7 x 2.
• The number of compound nouns is 7. The number of Greek letters in these 7
nouns is 49, or 7 x 7.
• Only one city is named in this passage, Babylon, which in Greek contains
exactly 7 letters.
Matthew’s sectional use of 14 generations has been mooted to reflect the then current belief of the number of High Priests from Aaron to the establishment of Solomon’s Temple, from the establishment from the Temple until Jaddua, the last High Priest mentioned in Scripture. Others have argued that in his 3x14 division Matthew is reflecting a then already widely-held belief of a universal world-week patterned after the seven days of creation (i.e. 6x7), six “days” followed by a Messianic age i.e. a Sabbath, or a pattern following the formula used in Daniel. Whatever the case may be, it was not accidental.
Matthew begins the Gospel with a chiastic form in 1:1,17 (ABC, genealogy, C'B'A') for the genealogy in vv 2-16. In this case each half of the frame summarises the significance of the enclosed genealogy. There is also a chiastic appearance of Abraham and David in his genealogy i.e.
Jesus 1.1b
David 1.1c
Abraham 1.1d
Abraham1.2
David1.6
Jesus1.16
Breck holds that 3:1-17 and 4:1-17 form a chiasm centred upon John’s claim that Jesus will baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire, enclosed by 2 expressions of “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Fenton and Gaechter have argued that all of Matthew is chiastic, the latter also pointing out the numerical patterns that control the several parts of the whole. Others have stated that Matthew has complicated circles of chiasms within chiasms, and these too have chiasms controlling them.
Furthermore some have argued that there is a typological literary reflection in Matthew’s Gospel which looks something like this:
Matthew OT
1:1: Book of Genesis Gen 2:4; 5:1
(i.e. toledoth and sepher
toledoth)
1:1-17: son of Abraham Gen 12-26
1:18-25: Joseph the dreamer Gen 37
2:1-12: Magi Nations to Egypt for Joseph
2:13-15: Herod kills children Exod 1-2: Pharaoh
kills children
2:14: Jesus rescued, flees Exod 2: Moses rescued,
flees
2:19-23: Jesus returns to Israel Exod 3-4: Moses returns
to Egypt
3:1-12: John announces judgment Exod 5-12: Moses/Aaron
bring judgment
3:13-17: Jesus passes through Exod 14: Parting of the
waters waters of the Red Sea
4:1-11: Temptation in wilderness Exod 17-19: Travel in Sinai
4:18-22: Jesus calls disciples Exod 18: Moses appoints
rulers
chs. 5-7: Sermon on the Mount Ex 19 ff Sinai and the
and various explanations of Law giving of Torah
Matthew also demonstrates a reliance on the number three throughout his Gospel: 3 temptations, 3 illustrations of righteousness, 3 miracles of healing, 3 miracles of power, 3 miracles of restoration, threefold ‘fear not’, threefold answer to the question about fasting, 3 complaints of the Pharisees, 3 ‘is not worthy of me’, 3 parables of sowing, 3 sayings about ‘little ones’, 3 questions, 3 parables of warning, 3 prayers at Gethsemane, 3 denials of Peter, 3 petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, 3 aspirations in the Lord’s Prayer. There is also a triadic structure to the Sermon on the Mount which reflects a well-known triad of Jewish piety preserved in mAb. 1:2 (446).
There are also 7 demons, seven loaves, seven baskets, sevenfold forgiveness, seven brothers and seven woes. As Marshall Johnson wrote, “Considered in the light of this tendency toward numerical structure, the arrangement of the genealogy into 3 x 14 or 3 x 7 x 2 seems entirely congruous. The evangelist draws attention to the form of the genealogy because it is a survey of pre-Messianic history intending to underscore the predetermined character of the coming of Jesus, the Messiah.”
From the list of additional literary device Kaye supplied, in the first few chapters of Matthew one can see the following utilised by the Gospel writer when composing the text: parallel plotting with its ostensible appearance of simultaneity, delayed action and outcomes, convergence and retrospective alignment, sequential twists, temporal shifts, temporal gaps and blanks, analogous or repetitive themes and incidents, alternation whereby the narrative sequence zig-zags between objective simultaneities, suspense-driven episodes, parataxis.
So, what would a Sydney Anglican Evangelical following the much-heralded Dickson rule be forced to conclude? Matthew is neither prose nor historiography. Of course, similar material could be raised with reference to the other Gospels and similar conclusions stated.
As a liberal Dickson looks toward structure and not content (i.e. Don’t confuse me with the facts!). Kaye pointed out that Hebrew prose can be identified by the use of particular grammatical constructs. Anon and Dickson are oblivious to this (maybe they don’t read footnotes?) or choose to ignore it because it would destroy their case. Kaye wrote: “The particles ’et (the sign of the definite direct object), ’ašer (the relative pronoun), and ha- (the definite article) all have been identified as prosaic elements, not common in or suitable to poetry....In general, these particulars occur six to eight times more frequently in prose passages than in poetic ones. Statistically the results are even more important, since they establish beyond cavil that the occurrence of these particles is a valid discriminant, and the difference in distribution reflects an intrinsic distinction between prose and poetry. All these elements are present in Genesis 1.”
7. I believe Anon misunderstood a statement I made or maybe I didn’t explain it clearly enough. I suggested that liberals saw various parts of the Bible as historiographic which were the very sections that contain the literary devices that Anon and Dickson trumpet as being indicative of non-history. My point was not that these liberals BELIEVED these sections to be actual history, but that they saw it had the form of history i.e. historiographic i.e it resembled history writing. What the majority of liberals then do is provide a reason, any reason, to give their liberalism a veneer of credibility. In like manner, Dickson and Anon throw up this specious and contrived link between literary devices and non-history and non-historiography. That both these people state their case in a circular fashion and never once actually give evidence for it is lost in the debate. Anon further arrogantly tries to make us orthodox prove our case, another clear indication of his liberal and heretical view of Scripture. Anon, like Dickson, never actually supply any evidence for their belief.
8. So that clarified, Anon wanted to see some evidence that liberals accept the earliest parts of the Bible as historiography.
(i) Meir Sternberg understood the Bible to “transmute even invention into the stuff of history”
(ii) Robert Alter, the well-known literary theorist, calls Genesis and Exodus “fiction in the guise of history” and “historicized prose fiction.” Elsewhere he writes concerning Judges, “It is perhaps less historicized fiction than fictionalized history – history in which the feeling and the meaning of events are concretely realised through the technical resources of prose fiction.”
(iii) In other words, even an uber-liberal like Alter can see that this writing possesses the appearance of historiography, though, of course, denying its objective factuality. Dickson, however, denies that Genesis 1 even takes the form of historiography because – and let’s take him at his word here – it’s lumbered with too many literary devices. At least Alter is a tad more convincing because he denies it’s true but says it was written to appear like history. This is not all that dissimilar to the High Priest of atheism Richard Dawkins who many years ago, speaking to Phillip Adams, stated something to the effect that he understood from the text that the writers of Genesis 1 believed that what they wrote was literal and had occurred, unlike the dishonest contemporary Christian interpreters who try to make days seem like ages.
(iv) Even Adele Berlin agreed that despite the Bible being fiction and denying the miraculous, the stories were presented in a realistic narrative. Go figure, Anon.
9. Just a comment on a rather confusing point Anon made. He said that I was “incapable…of escaping from the simplistic but entirely spurious disjunction [I]’ve sought to establish between literal history and non-history.”
Now, I may have misunderstood Anon’s point here, but it seems to me that this is exactly the liberal cake-and-eat-it-too doctrine that the Sydney Anglo Heretics are becoming quickly famous for. I believe it was Warwick who first pointed this out on the Blog. They call Genesis 1 truth but not true truth. Anon’s comment seems to be a variation on this.
In any case, this is begging the question that Genesis is not historiography and history, and is another example of the hubris of these heretics who, while denying the traditional Church’s statements concerning the historical truth of Genesis 1, maintain that theirs is the right and only view of Genesis 1. They throw in all the usual red-herrings like the Good Samaritan Parable and pose all the hollow questions like “Was there really a certain man on the road to Jericho?” etc, as though this actually nullifies Genesis 1’s claim to being an accurate record of the Earth’s history.
No, Anon, it’s you and your postmodern, neo-orthodox mates over there in Anglo ga-ga land which have to prove the novel idea that there is no disjunction between literal history and non-history.
10. In summation, it is apparent that people like Anon and Dickson believe that art in writing spells the death of historiography. Or it may be the case that too much art is incommensurate with the writing of history (neither ever flesh their argument out). Now, maybe this is the case in contemporary history writing – I am not sufficiently adept to pass opinion – but, and my case presented here is hardly exhaustive, it would hardly seem that this was true in antiquity. Why, then, would Anon and Dickson make such a song and dance concerning literary devices in Genesis 1 when these, and more, appear throughout Scripture far more abundantly and in exceedingly more complex application? The answer is hardly rocket science. They disingenuously are led by the conclusions of materialistic science, notwithstanding their protestations to the contrary. It’s heresy business as usual with these guys!
I want to finish this thread by quoting the arch-liberal Bultmann. He wrote that “the literary devices with which [the author of John’s Gospel] builds the discussions—the use of ambiguous concepts and statements to elicit misunderstandings—are indicative that he lives within the sphere of Gnostic-dualistic thinking.” These ambiguities and misunderstandings are not “merely formal technical devices. Rather, they are the expression of his underlying dualistic view.”
As we know, Bultmann did not really care for any talk of the Gospels being history, just as Dickson and his zealous supporters truck no argument that Genesis 1 is history. It is indeed one of those queer coincidences of history that both Bultmann and Dickson identify the catalyst for the removal of the historical as the inclusion of literary devices by the authors of the biblical text.
11. Conclusion
Let me borrow heavily from Dickson’s own argument and, mutatis mutandis, present a more likely conclusion:
The chronology of the chapter is stunning and, to ancient readers, unmistakable. It casts the creation as a work of history, sharing in the temporality of God and deriving from him. My point is obvious: the inclusion of a prescript for the benefit of modern readers would be unnecessary because the original author could hardly have made it clearer that his message is historiographic rather than literary and ahistoric.”
Moreover, one can’t but help be reminded of C.S. Lewis’ trenchant censure of these Anglicans who seek to present another Gospel, a Gospel that robs Christ of his nature and office:
“Whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgement, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading…These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can’t see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight.”
Finally, a word from Peter, the disciple who was mocked by Anon:
"First of all you must realise that in the last days cynical mockers will undoubtedly come - men whose only guide in life is what they want for themselves - and they will say, "Everything remains as it was since the beginning of creation!" They are deliberately shutting their eyes to the fact that there were heavens in the old days and an earth formed by God's command out of water and by water. It was by water that the world of those days was deluged and destroyed."
1. I believe the following is a fair representation of Anonymous’ case against me.
a. I offered Kay’s paper as proof and argued that literary devices don’t
negate the claim of a passage to being history.
b. Dickson proposed the inclusion of so many literary devices means
Genesis 1 isn’t history.
c. I overlooked the subtlety of Dickson’s argument.
d. I‘m dumb as it’s not true truth.
e. QED, Dickson’s case is subtle and accurate.
f. Genesis 1 isn’t an historical report because of the large number of
literary devices
g. It is right to say that Kay’s case lacks a strong and sharp disproof to
Dickson’s thesis that Genesis is non-history.
2. To refresh everyone’s memory what Dickson wrote: “Genesis 1…is composed in a style quite different from the ‘historical narrative’ of, say, the Gospels in their accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, for instance…Genesis 1, on the other hand, is not written in the style we normally associate with historical report. It is difficult even to describe the passage as prose. The original Hebrew of this passage is marked by intricate structure, rhythm, parallelism, chiasmus, repetition and the lavish use of number symbolism. These features are not observed together in those parts of the Bible we recognize as historical prose…I will, however, draw attention to the number symbolism present in our passage. [John gives a number of examples of the number 7 and its multiples in the text and then concludes with] The artistry of the chapter is stunning and, to ancient readers, unmistakable. It casts the creation as a work of art, sharing in the perfection of God and deriving from him. My point is obvious: short of including a prescript for the benefit of modern readers the original author could hardly have made it clearer that his message is being conveyed through literary rather than prosaic means.”
So, clearly Dickson is saying from “the lavish use of number[s]” alone that one can conclude Genesis 1 is not historiography. I’ll address this in a moment but, as you stated elsewhere, what’s good for a goose is good for the gander, and so I think it was entirely reasonable for me to argue (as Kay had in his paper) that individually these literary devices do not necessarily convey non-history.
Furthermore, as you have implied, these devices are found in historiographic passages. (Although, Dickson, by not actually exploring this “incidental” detail, seems hell-bent on not providing examples for the reader so they can at least make up their own mind as to the strength of his case. After all, if, for example, a clearly historiographic section of one of the Gospels were to contain several literary devices, I would assume that even the most zealously sycophantic of Dickson’s backers would be less inclined to argue for the soundness of his thesis. Hmmm, maybe not so on second thought, given their hitherto lending of unconditional support for just about any old excuse that maintains their obduracy and love of heresy) I would obviously concur. So the problem for you and Dickson is this: If the inclusion of one device does not in and of itself transform historiography to non-historiography, and the addition of another similarly doesn’t, and another etc etc don’t, why would the inclusion of all 6 suddenly tip the scale? If you reply that this “uniqueness” is the very characteristic that does turn historiography to non-historiography, isn’t that just simply a case of question-begging? Wouldn’t one need to provide several examples from other sources, particularly non-biblical ones, which demonstrate the soundness of this proposition?
Looking at it in a not entirely different way, Dickson has tacitly stated that, all other things being equal,
(i) 1 Literary Device = Historiography,
(ii) LD+LD = Historiography
(iii) LD+LD+LD = Historiography
(iv) LD+LD+LD+LD = Historiography
and
(v) LD+LD+LD+LD+LD = Historiography
yet he contends that
LD+LD+LD+LD+LD+LD ≠ Historiography
I am at a loss how 1,2,3,4, or even 5 pluses add up to a plus but an additional 6th makes it a zero. Along with destroying biblical facts, you guys seem to have the same menacing attitude to maths. This reminds me of Dallas Willard’s comment: “[U]nsound arguments are not to be expected by their collective force to prove a conclusion which none can establish by themselves."
3. So since you’ve admitted that literary devices are utilised by the author in historiography, where does Dickson (and you) draw the cut-off line? It seems that since these devices are everywhere, in historical prose and poetry alike, then the answer must be, “Well, anywhere I damn well please!” This of course demonstrates the arbitrary nature of your argument. That, putatively, these devices only appear in such numbers in Genesis 1 and no where else is not the clincher you imagine it to be. After all, breathing over its neck is a passage of historical narrative that has one less literary device. If none of the ancients were bothered with their inclusion why should we listen to Dickson and a nobody called Anonymous. All this to me seems like something new to tickle those who are easily dissuaded from the plain, straightforward, uncomplicated historical truth of the first page of God’s revelation to us. That the common ploughboy has never seen this wolf-in-sheep’s clothing “truth” you’re presently serving up to the Church only strengthens our resolve to root you heretics out.
4. While we are on the subject, I’d like to point out that neither Dickson nor Anon never actually identify where these literary devices appear in the text. I suppose we’re to just take their word that all 6 actually appear in Genesis.
So, would either of these two heretics (or the Dickson sycophants over in the Sydney Diocese) change their view if just one of the mooted devices didn’t appear in Genesis 1? That is, based on Dickson’s thesis, if the sum total of these devices were 5, would these heretics accept Genesis 1 as history or can nothing falsify Dickson’s proposition?
5. Just on this issue, a few years ago an Israeli Oxford Hebraist academic informed me that sustained rhythm, the type that non-prose should contain if it does have rhythm, is not in Genesis 1. What rhythm there is, is far too brief to be important and is a chance by-product of speech in general. In other words, one would be drawing a really long bow to claim that rhythm is a salient literary device in Genesis 1.
6. But just to fulfil my epistemic obligation, let me provide you with a few passages where there is a preponderance of literary devices. To make it easier for me I’ll be borrowing considerably from Dickson’s paper.
The Flood Narrative
It is well known that in Hebrew thought the number 8 symbolises new beginnings, resurrection or regeneration and 13 betrayal. A well-known example for the former is many baptismal fonts are eight-sided, as is the baptismal cross, while the latter is the number of people at the Last Supper.
In the narrative of Noah, which contains the Flood account, multiples of 8 appear in extraordinary ways. For ancient readers, who were accustomed to taking notice of such things, these multiples of 8 conveyed a powerful message. Its omnipresence in many chapters of the Bible makes an unmistakable point about the ultimate authorship of the Bible itself. Consider the following in this account:
a. The “berit” (covenant) stem appears 8 times
b. The number of people saved on the ark was 8
c. The sign of the covenant, “qeshet” (rainbow) has a numerical value in Hebrew
of 800
d. The Flood was 40 days (i.e. 5 x 8) upon the earth
e. Noah waited another 40 days until he opened the window
f. He then sent out a raven, numerical value 272 (i.e. 8 x 32)
g. Noah’s name is occasionally spelled with a vav and thus his name has a
numerical value of 64 i.e. 8 x 8
h. From Adam to Noah’s Flood there were 1656 (207 x 8) years
And btw,
i. Indeed, Jesus’ very name in Greek numerical values has the value of 888,
which also equals in Hebrew Yeshoth Elohenu i.e. Our God’s Salvation
j. Jesus appeared to Thomas on the 8th day
k. Pistis (faith) has the same numerical value as Kurios (Lord) i.e. 800
As to the number 7,
a. The clean beasts were taken on in lots of seven
b. Assuming 30 days in a lunar month, the fountains of the deep were broken up
on the 2nd month, 17th day of Noah’s 600th year i.e. the 77th day
c. The Ark came to rest in the 7th month
d. The tops of the mountains were seen on the first day of the 10th month i.e. (
10 x 30) +1 = 301 = 43 x 7
e. The seventh occurrence of the name Noah is in Genesis 6:9 and here he is
called ‘perfect’. The Hebrew word here is thammim which has a numerical
value of 490 i.e. 70 x 7
f. The number of times that God spoke to Noah was seven.
Any other literary devices? Sure.
• A play on words: In Hebrew the name ‘Noah’ is an anagram of ‘Grace’. The first appearance of ‘grace’ is in Genesis 6:8: ‘But Noah found grace in the eyes of YHWH’. The numerical value of YHWH is 26. The word ‘grace’ is found in 26 (13 x 2) verses in Torah.
• Parallelism: In Genesis 6:9 "perfect in his generations" acts as a parallel thought to Noah being "a just man."
• Parallelism: In Genesis 7: 6-10, 11-16 this device can be discerned as re-emphasising and enlarging upon the same ideas.
• Chiasmus:
Genesis 7:10 – And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.
Genesis 7:12 - And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.
Genesis 7:24 – The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.
Genesis 8:3 – The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down,
Genesis 8:6 - After forty days Noah opened the window he had made in the ark
Genesis 8:10 - He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark.
Here’s another:
Introduction (6:9-10)
1. Violence on the earth (6:11-12)
2. First speech: intent to destroy earth (6:13-22)
3. Second speech: go into the ark (7:1-10)
4. The Flood starts (7:11-16)
5. The flood rises (7:17-24)
Climax-God remembers Noah (8:1a)
5a. The Flood recedes (8:1b-5)
4a. Drying off of the earth (8:6-14)
3a. Third speech: leave the ark (8:15-19)
2a. Will not destroy earth again (8:20-22)
1a. Fourth speech: the covenant (9:1-17)
Conclusion (9:18-19)
There is a chiastic structure in the genealogy: Noah's sons are listed in this order: Shem, Ham, and Japheth; then they are discussed in reverse order.
• Repetition
(i) The destruction of life
(ii) Establishment of the covenant
(iii) The types of animals on the ark
What then can we at this blog conclude? All of this definitely will convince the heretics in the Sydney Anglo Fun Park that Noah’s story and the Flood specifically are not historical or historiography.
When I previously pointed out that the Flood account contains all the features Dickson has said tell the reader to think ‘non-history/non-historiography’, Anon’s remark was “ROFL.” In fact, Anon went on to suggest these chapters of Genesis were on the sae level as a fairy tale like Goldilocks and the 3 bears.
I suspect Anon will mock my argument, as he has done previously (he poured scorn on my comment and said I had a weak argument when I offered Jesus’ and Peter’s testimonies as proof that the Bible’s account of the Flood should be taken as history), but this behaviour is what one expects from heretics. As we progress through the Bible more and more chapters start to be transformed from historiography to myth or some other liberal nomenclature.
Abraham
• Numbers
a. There are 613 commandments in Torah. Of these 248 are positive and 365 negative. Abraham, the first Jew, was called righteous before God and is regarded as the paradigm of perfection. His name has the number value of 248 (31x 8), the number of positive commandments.
b. The son of Abraham, Yizhak, has 4 letters to his name each with a numerical value of 10, 90, 8 and 100 respectively. The first refers to the 10 commandments, the second to the age of Sarah when he was born, the third, the age at his circumcision and the last to the age of Abraham when he was born. A miracle performed for a mother and father was for the sake of a child who would be circumcised and enter a covenant.
c. Concerning the number 13, circumcision for Ishmael was carried out when he was 13, the word for covenant, berit, is mentioned 13 times in Genesis 17, the chapter which sets out the circumcision command.
d. In Genesis 14:14 there are 318 men who went out to rescue his relative. Interesting, Eliezer the servant of Abraham, the “heir” of Abraham, has a numerical value for his name of 318.
• Chiasmus:
A Display of faith: Abram leaves his homeland; the first promise 11:31–12:3
B Abram sojourns in Canaan 12:4-9
C The stay in Egypt; Abram passes Sarai off as his sister 12:10-20
D The separation of Abram, who has the promise, from Lot, who does not
have the promise 13:1-18
E The rescue of Lot 14:1-24
F Abram’s fears of infertility are allayed by the promise of a
son; God makes a covenant 15:1-21
G Sarai’s attempt to get a son: Ishmael 16:1-16
H THE COVENANT; Abram’s new name,
etc. 17:1-10
G´ Circumcision; the rejection of Ishmael and the
promise of a son through Sarah 17:9-27
F´ Sarah is told of the promise of a son, despite her fears of
infertility 18:1-15
E´ The rescue of Lot 18:16–19:38
D´ The stay in Gerar; Abraham passes Sarah off as his sister 20:1-18
C´ The birth of Isaac; the separation of Isaac, the child of the promise, from
Ishmael, the child outside the promise 21:1-21
B´ Abraham sojourns among the Philistines 21:22-34
A´ Display of faith: Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac; the final promise 22:1-19
And there are chiasms within chiasms. For example, Genesis 12:16 appears as an inventory but has been arranged chiastically. So, if Dickson’s rule is true then Abram’s sheep are not referring to historic sheep but artistic ones.
There are also significant and lavish use of numbers concerning the other patriarchs etc
a. Adam is 130 when he begot Seth and lives another 800 years.
b. Jacob has 1 daughter and 8 sons from his wives and 4 sons from the
shefahot i.e. 13 children.
c. When Jacob’s name is changed to Israel by God, then last time he is called
Jacob is the 130th appearance of Jacob’s name in Torah.
d. Jacob’s age in front of Pharaoh is 130 while Moses was 80
e. The only ages given for Joseph are 17, 30, 110, gaps of 13 and 80
f. Sarah was at her death 127 years old = 100 + 20 + 7. The gaps here are 80
and 13.
g. Circumcision is on the 8th day.
And I am more than sure that if I could be bothered – which I am definitely not – I could find far too many examples of devices which Kay listed in his article, including, parallel plotting with its ostensible appearance of simultaneity, delayed action and outcomes, asymmetrical and ironic juxtapositioning, convergence and retrospective alignment, sequential twists, temporal shifts, the omitting or ambiguating of causal links, temporal gaps and blanks, analogous or repetitive themes and incidents, alternation whereby the narrative sequence zig-zags between objective simultaneities, suspense-driven episodes, deep interlinear polarities of theme, foreclosure or premature curtain-dropping which “jumps ahead” in absolute time in order to synchronize effects, the establishment of contextual hierarchies of importance, shifts in focus, complex word plays, parataxis, and interepisodic suspense.
Matthew’s Gospel
The first 17 verses of the New Testament (The Gospel of Matthew) deals with a single principal subject: the genealogy of Jesus Christ. It contains 72 Greek vocabulary words in these initial 17 versus. The following structures are supposedly found.
• The number of words which are nouns is exactly 56, or 7 x 8. The Greek
word "the" occurs most frequently in the passage: exactly 56 times, or 7 x 8.
• The number of different forms in which the article "the" occurs is exactly 7
• There are two main sections in the passage: verse 1-11 and 12-17. In the
first main section, the number of Greek vocabulary words used is 49, or 7 x 7 Of these 49 words, the number of those beginning with a vowel is 28, or 7 x 4
• The number of words beginning with a consonant is 21, or 7 x 3. The total
number of letters in these 49 words is exactly 266, or 7 x 38-exactly.
• The numbers of vowels among these 266 letters is 140, or 7 x 20. The number
of consonants is 126, or 7 x 18-exactly.
• Of these 49 words, the number of words which occur more than once is 35, or 7 x 5.
• The number of words occurring only once is 14, or 7 x2.
• The number of words which occur in only one form is exactly 42, or 7 x 6.
• The number of words appearing in more than one form is also 7.
• The number of 49 Greek vocabulary words which are nouns is 42, or 7 x 6.
• The number of words which are not nouns is 7.
• Of the nouns, 35 are proper names, or 7 x 5. These 35 nouns are used 63
times, or 7 x 9.
• The number of male names is 28, or 7 x 4. These male names occur 56 times or
7 x 8.
• The number of names which is not male is 7.
• Three women are mentioned-Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth. The number of Greek
letters in these three names is 14, or 7 x 2.
• The number of compound nouns is 7. The number of Greek letters in these 7
nouns is 49, or 7 x 7.
• Only one city is named in this passage, Babylon, which in Greek contains
exactly 7 letters.
Matthew’s sectional use of 14 generations has been mooted to reflect the then current belief of the number of High Priests from Aaron to the establishment of Solomon’s Temple, from the establishment from the Temple until Jaddua, the last High Priest mentioned in Scripture. Others have argued that in his 3x14 division Matthew is reflecting a then already widely-held belief of a universal world-week patterned after the seven days of creation (i.e. 6x7), six “days” followed by a Messianic age i.e. a Sabbath, or a pattern following the formula used in Daniel. Whatever the case may be, it was not accidental.
Matthew begins the Gospel with a chiastic form in 1:1,17 (ABC, genealogy, C'B'A') for the genealogy in vv 2-16. In this case each half of the frame summarises the significance of the enclosed genealogy. There is also a chiastic appearance of Abraham and David in his genealogy i.e.
Jesus 1.1b
David 1.1c
Abraham 1.1d
Abraham1.2
David1.6
Jesus1.16
Breck holds that 3:1-17 and 4:1-17 form a chiasm centred upon John’s claim that Jesus will baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire, enclosed by 2 expressions of “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
Fenton and Gaechter have argued that all of Matthew is chiastic, the latter also pointing out the numerical patterns that control the several parts of the whole. Others have stated that Matthew has complicated circles of chiasms within chiasms, and these too have chiasms controlling them.
Furthermore some have argued that there is a typological literary reflection in Matthew’s Gospel which looks something like this:
Matthew OT
1:1: Book of Genesis Gen 2:4; 5:1
(i.e. toledoth and sepher
toledoth)
1:1-17: son of Abraham Gen 12-26
1:18-25: Joseph the dreamer Gen 37
2:1-12: Magi Nations to Egypt for Joseph
2:13-15: Herod kills children Exod 1-2: Pharaoh
kills children
2:14: Jesus rescued, flees Exod 2: Moses rescued,
flees
2:19-23: Jesus returns to Israel Exod 3-4: Moses returns
to Egypt
3:1-12: John announces judgment Exod 5-12: Moses/Aaron
bring judgment
3:13-17: Jesus passes through Exod 14: Parting of the
waters waters of the Red Sea
4:1-11: Temptation in wilderness Exod 17-19: Travel in Sinai
4:18-22: Jesus calls disciples Exod 18: Moses appoints
rulers
chs. 5-7: Sermon on the Mount Ex 19 ff Sinai and the
and various explanations of Law giving of Torah
Matthew also demonstrates a reliance on the number three throughout his Gospel: 3 temptations, 3 illustrations of righteousness, 3 miracles of healing, 3 miracles of power, 3 miracles of restoration, threefold ‘fear not’, threefold answer to the question about fasting, 3 complaints of the Pharisees, 3 ‘is not worthy of me’, 3 parables of sowing, 3 sayings about ‘little ones’, 3 questions, 3 parables of warning, 3 prayers at Gethsemane, 3 denials of Peter, 3 petitions in the Lord’s Prayer, 3 aspirations in the Lord’s Prayer. There is also a triadic structure to the Sermon on the Mount which reflects a well-known triad of Jewish piety preserved in mAb. 1:2 (446).
There are also 7 demons, seven loaves, seven baskets, sevenfold forgiveness, seven brothers and seven woes. As Marshall Johnson wrote, “Considered in the light of this tendency toward numerical structure, the arrangement of the genealogy into 3 x 14 or 3 x 7 x 2 seems entirely congruous. The evangelist draws attention to the form of the genealogy because it is a survey of pre-Messianic history intending to underscore the predetermined character of the coming of Jesus, the Messiah.”
From the list of additional literary device Kaye supplied, in the first few chapters of Matthew one can see the following utilised by the Gospel writer when composing the text: parallel plotting with its ostensible appearance of simultaneity, delayed action and outcomes, convergence and retrospective alignment, sequential twists, temporal shifts, temporal gaps and blanks, analogous or repetitive themes and incidents, alternation whereby the narrative sequence zig-zags between objective simultaneities, suspense-driven episodes, parataxis.
So, what would a Sydney Anglican Evangelical following the much-heralded Dickson rule be forced to conclude? Matthew is neither prose nor historiography. Of course, similar material could be raised with reference to the other Gospels and similar conclusions stated.
As a liberal Dickson looks toward structure and not content (i.e. Don’t confuse me with the facts!). Kaye pointed out that Hebrew prose can be identified by the use of particular grammatical constructs. Anon and Dickson are oblivious to this (maybe they don’t read footnotes?) or choose to ignore it because it would destroy their case. Kaye wrote: “The particles ’et (the sign of the definite direct object), ’ašer (the relative pronoun), and ha- (the definite article) all have been identified as prosaic elements, not common in or suitable to poetry....In general, these particulars occur six to eight times more frequently in prose passages than in poetic ones. Statistically the results are even more important, since they establish beyond cavil that the occurrence of these particles is a valid discriminant, and the difference in distribution reflects an intrinsic distinction between prose and poetry. All these elements are present in Genesis 1.”
7. I believe Anon misunderstood a statement I made or maybe I didn’t explain it clearly enough. I suggested that liberals saw various parts of the Bible as historiographic which were the very sections that contain the literary devices that Anon and Dickson trumpet as being indicative of non-history. My point was not that these liberals BELIEVED these sections to be actual history, but that they saw it had the form of history i.e. historiographic i.e it resembled history writing. What the majority of liberals then do is provide a reason, any reason, to give their liberalism a veneer of credibility. In like manner, Dickson and Anon throw up this specious and contrived link between literary devices and non-history and non-historiography. That both these people state their case in a circular fashion and never once actually give evidence for it is lost in the debate. Anon further arrogantly tries to make us orthodox prove our case, another clear indication of his liberal and heretical view of Scripture. Anon, like Dickson, never actually supply any evidence for their belief.
8. So that clarified, Anon wanted to see some evidence that liberals accept the earliest parts of the Bible as historiography.
(i) Meir Sternberg understood the Bible to “transmute even invention into the stuff of history”
(ii) Robert Alter, the well-known literary theorist, calls Genesis and Exodus “fiction in the guise of history” and “historicized prose fiction.” Elsewhere he writes concerning Judges, “It is perhaps less historicized fiction than fictionalized history – history in which the feeling and the meaning of events are concretely realised through the technical resources of prose fiction.”
(iii) In other words, even an uber-liberal like Alter can see that this writing possesses the appearance of historiography, though, of course, denying its objective factuality. Dickson, however, denies that Genesis 1 even takes the form of historiography because – and let’s take him at his word here – it’s lumbered with too many literary devices. At least Alter is a tad more convincing because he denies it’s true but says it was written to appear like history. This is not all that dissimilar to the High Priest of atheism Richard Dawkins who many years ago, speaking to Phillip Adams, stated something to the effect that he understood from the text that the writers of Genesis 1 believed that what they wrote was literal and had occurred, unlike the dishonest contemporary Christian interpreters who try to make days seem like ages.
(iv) Even Adele Berlin agreed that despite the Bible being fiction and denying the miraculous, the stories were presented in a realistic narrative. Go figure, Anon.
9. Just a comment on a rather confusing point Anon made. He said that I was “incapable…of escaping from the simplistic but entirely spurious disjunction [I]’ve sought to establish between literal history and non-history.”
Now, I may have misunderstood Anon’s point here, but it seems to me that this is exactly the liberal cake-and-eat-it-too doctrine that the Sydney Anglo Heretics are becoming quickly famous for. I believe it was Warwick who first pointed this out on the Blog. They call Genesis 1 truth but not true truth. Anon’s comment seems to be a variation on this.
In any case, this is begging the question that Genesis is not historiography and history, and is another example of the hubris of these heretics who, while denying the traditional Church’s statements concerning the historical truth of Genesis 1, maintain that theirs is the right and only view of Genesis 1. They throw in all the usual red-herrings like the Good Samaritan Parable and pose all the hollow questions like “Was there really a certain man on the road to Jericho?” etc, as though this actually nullifies Genesis 1’s claim to being an accurate record of the Earth’s history.
No, Anon, it’s you and your postmodern, neo-orthodox mates over there in Anglo ga-ga land which have to prove the novel idea that there is no disjunction between literal history and non-history.
10. In summation, it is apparent that people like Anon and Dickson believe that art in writing spells the death of historiography. Or it may be the case that too much art is incommensurate with the writing of history (neither ever flesh their argument out). Now, maybe this is the case in contemporary history writing – I am not sufficiently adept to pass opinion – but, and my case presented here is hardly exhaustive, it would hardly seem that this was true in antiquity. Why, then, would Anon and Dickson make such a song and dance concerning literary devices in Genesis 1 when these, and more, appear throughout Scripture far more abundantly and in exceedingly more complex application? The answer is hardly rocket science. They disingenuously are led by the conclusions of materialistic science, notwithstanding their protestations to the contrary. It’s heresy business as usual with these guys!
I want to finish this thread by quoting the arch-liberal Bultmann. He wrote that “the literary devices with which [the author of John’s Gospel] builds the discussions—the use of ambiguous concepts and statements to elicit misunderstandings—are indicative that he lives within the sphere of Gnostic-dualistic thinking.” These ambiguities and misunderstandings are not “merely formal technical devices. Rather, they are the expression of his underlying dualistic view.”
As we know, Bultmann did not really care for any talk of the Gospels being history, just as Dickson and his zealous supporters truck no argument that Genesis 1 is history. It is indeed one of those queer coincidences of history that both Bultmann and Dickson identify the catalyst for the removal of the historical as the inclusion of literary devices by the authors of the biblical text.
11. Conclusion
Let me borrow heavily from Dickson’s own argument and, mutatis mutandis, present a more likely conclusion:
The chronology of the chapter is stunning and, to ancient readers, unmistakable. It casts the creation as a work of history, sharing in the temporality of God and deriving from him. My point is obvious: the inclusion of a prescript for the benefit of modern readers would be unnecessary because the original author could hardly have made it clearer that his message is historiographic rather than literary and ahistoric.”
Moreover, one can’t but help be reminded of C.S. Lewis’ trenchant censure of these Anglicans who seek to present another Gospel, a Gospel that robs Christ of his nature and office:
“Whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgement, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading…These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can’t see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight.”
Finally, a word from Peter, the disciple who was mocked by Anon:
"First of all you must realise that in the last days cynical mockers will undoubtedly come - men whose only guide in life is what they want for themselves - and they will say, "Everything remains as it was since the beginning of creation!" They are deliberately shutting their eyes to the fact that there were heavens in the old days and an earth formed by God's command out of water and by water. It was by water that the world of those days was deluged and destroyed."
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Sleeping with the atheists
Did anyone catch last Saturday’s Herald an article ‘When extinction becomes a heresy’? It was an edited extract from an essay titled ‘Empathy for the enemy’, which, as I’ll soon explain, is manifestly ironic.
The article was jam-packed with the usual maudlin and irrational animal “rights” rhetoric that is endlessly promoted nowadays in mainstream media. More outrageous was its attempt to compare the necessary elimination of rabbits and foxes from Australia with the barbarism of Auschwitz. This elevation of animal rights, I may add, is entirely consistent with Nazi practices and their obsession with all things green.
Notwithstanding this attempt to muddy the clear line of separation between man and animal, attention needs to be called to the only theoretical basis on which such a move can be reasonably postulated, that being the “truth” of evolution. In other words, all life has common ancestry, and this was clearly reiterated in the article.
As a related aside, the Evangelical Union of Sydney University recently had their perennial compromising science/religion lunchtime talk. One of the scientists on the panel of “experts”, when asked about evolution, gave it an unqualified thumbs up. I couldn’t help but notice the confused look on the atheist’s face who asked the question. Quite rightly she instantly realised the incommensurability and the procrustean explanation of a putative marriage between Christian theism and this materialistic worldview.
One last jibe at the essay’s author Clive Marks. Marks is blissfully and philosophically unaware that just because something is the case (i.e. rabbits suffer when exposed to Myxomatosis), that this is sufficient epistemic justification to derive moral condemnation concerning this fact (i.e. it’s morally reprehensible to expose rabbits to Myxomatosis because rabbits suffer). And certainly, on an evolutionary epistemic in which the fit win and the weak are removed, I can’t see how a reversal of nature’s norm is at all warranted.
Now to the real comment I wish to make.
What grabbed my attention was the article’s opening sentence: “Time and evolution have been detached creators”
This blog has endlessly pointed out that the heretics over in that other world of Sydney Anglicanism have robbed Christ of his glory and office by substituting another creator for Him. These wolves neither read the Bible properly nor listen to commonsense and advice and thus, in chasing after the world’s wisdom, they “are deluded by specious arguments…and fall prey to hollow and misleading philosophy.” Rather than wholeheartedly upholding Paul’s statement that “everything was created through him”, these rascals have deceived others that the gods of time and evolution can act as a surrogate for Christ. Not content with their own evil thoughts, they pour scorn on and try to silence any who oppose their ideas.
That atheists openly worship time and evolution as the “gods” of materialism only makes the SADs enlisting of these very same “gods” inexcusable.
The article was jam-packed with the usual maudlin and irrational animal “rights” rhetoric that is endlessly promoted nowadays in mainstream media. More outrageous was its attempt to compare the necessary elimination of rabbits and foxes from Australia with the barbarism of Auschwitz. This elevation of animal rights, I may add, is entirely consistent with Nazi practices and their obsession with all things green.
Notwithstanding this attempt to muddy the clear line of separation between man and animal, attention needs to be called to the only theoretical basis on which such a move can be reasonably postulated, that being the “truth” of evolution. In other words, all life has common ancestry, and this was clearly reiterated in the article.
As a related aside, the Evangelical Union of Sydney University recently had their perennial compromising science/religion lunchtime talk. One of the scientists on the panel of “experts”, when asked about evolution, gave it an unqualified thumbs up. I couldn’t help but notice the confused look on the atheist’s face who asked the question. Quite rightly she instantly realised the incommensurability and the procrustean explanation of a putative marriage between Christian theism and this materialistic worldview.
One last jibe at the essay’s author Clive Marks. Marks is blissfully and philosophically unaware that just because something is the case (i.e. rabbits suffer when exposed to Myxomatosis), that this is sufficient epistemic justification to derive moral condemnation concerning this fact (i.e. it’s morally reprehensible to expose rabbits to Myxomatosis because rabbits suffer). And certainly, on an evolutionary epistemic in which the fit win and the weak are removed, I can’t see how a reversal of nature’s norm is at all warranted.
Now to the real comment I wish to make.
What grabbed my attention was the article’s opening sentence: “Time and evolution have been detached creators”
This blog has endlessly pointed out that the heretics over in that other world of Sydney Anglicanism have robbed Christ of his glory and office by substituting another creator for Him. These wolves neither read the Bible properly nor listen to commonsense and advice and thus, in chasing after the world’s wisdom, they “are deluded by specious arguments…and fall prey to hollow and misleading philosophy.” Rather than wholeheartedly upholding Paul’s statement that “everything was created through him”, these rascals have deceived others that the gods of time and evolution can act as a surrogate for Christ. Not content with their own evil thoughts, they pour scorn on and try to silence any who oppose their ideas.
That atheists openly worship time and evolution as the “gods” of materialism only makes the SADs enlisting of these very same “gods” inexcusable.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
"When Your Number Is Up" or "Sydney Episcopalian Diocese Set to Deny Physical Birth of Jesus Christ".
It's interesting what you find when you delve back through your collection of books amassed over decades of Christian life. Sometimes you can't remember from where you purchased a particular book and why you purchased it.
Well such was the circumstance when I found a book in my cupboard written by F.C. Payne as the 14th edition in 1978. The book is called "The Seal of God". In his book, the author goes into much detail about the significance of numbers in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. The author presents his case that the high concentration of number sequences in both the Hebrew and Greek testify to the Divine inspiration of Scripture and the utilization of various authors over more than a millennium and who, by separation of time, could not have contrived their writings to present such unity of number sequences. I don't know the theology of F.C. Payne and I have not, in the past, made use of his propositions in my theology. I do note now, though, that nowhere does he deny the historicity of Scripture because of number sequences etc contained therein.
Contrast Payne's position with that of John Dickson and his disciples in the Sydney Episcopalian Diocese. These folk see number sequences, in particular the recurrence of the number seven (7), and automatically their brain slips into autodrive repeating "ahistorical", "ahistorical".
Well, in the sight of F.C Payne at least, for John Dickson and his disciples to be thoroughly consistent in their theology they must dismiss the wealth of historical narrative of Scripture widely accepted by the Church.
For example, the ministry of John the Baptist recorded in Mark 1: 1-8 and in John must, be rejected as history because of its overuse of the number seven (7). F.C. Payne provides the following:
"The words number 126 (18-7's)
And the syllables are 294 (42-7's)
The words in the vocabulary number 77 (sum 14) (11-7's)
The letters in the vocabulary number 427 (61-7's)
The vowels in the 427 letters are 224 (32-7's)
The consonants 203 (29-7's)
The vocabulary words used by John are 21 (3-7's)
Which leaves 56 (8-7's)
Those beginning with a vowel are 42 (6-7's)
Those beginning with a consonant 35 (5-7's)"
Payne also applies his mind to the birth of Christ recorded in Matthew 1: 18-25:
"The number of Greek words is exactly 161 (23-7's)
The numeric value of these is exactly 93,394 (13,342-7's)
The number of vocabulary words is exactly 77 (11-7's)
The numeric value of these is exactly 51,247 (7,321-7's)
Here we have a perfect, double, interlocked design covering every word and letter,which must remain constant, whilst the following designs are woven into it, and not a single letter can be altered:
There are six Greek words which are found nowhere else in Matt.
Their numeric value is exactly 5,005 (715-7's)
These six Greek words have exactly 56 letters (8-7's)
Now the first two verses, a natural division, (6-7's)
having exactly 42 words leaving 119 (17-7's)
The last verse, another natural division,
has exactly 14 words (2-7's)
leaving 147 (3-7's of 7's)
Again, the 161 words occur in 105 forms (15-7's)
The numeric value of these forms is exactly 65,429 (9,347-7's)
In these 105 forms are exactly 35 verbs (5-7's)
There are exactly 7 Proper names (7)
The number of letters in these 7 names is exactly 42 (6-7's)
There is one word 'Emanuel' used nowhere else
in the N.T.; its numeric value is 644 (92-7's)
The sum of its figures is 14 (2-7's)
Their numeric value is exactly 8,715 (1,245-7's)
Now we have another remarkable occurrence.
The angel speaks to Joseph, and although his words
form another pattern of their own, they fit exactly
into the whole!
In speaking to Joseph the angel uses of the 77 vocabulary
words exactly 28 (4-7's)
The numeric value of all the angel's words is
exactly 21,042 (3,006-7's)
The angel uses exactly 35 forms (5-7's)
These 35 forms have exactly 168 letters (24-7's)
The numeric value of these letters is
exactly 19,397 (2,771-7's)
Now the angel in using exactly 28 of the
vocabulary words leaves exactly 49 (7-7's)
In using exactly 35 forms he leaves exactly 70 (10-7's)
The sum of the figures 70 is 7, and its factors
7 + 2 + 5 is 14 (2-7's)
This by no means exhausts the passage but enough has been
shown here to show us that the design in it is not there by chance."
In light of the stance taken by John Dickson and his disciples on Genesis 1 - its high usage of the number 7 - and their subsequent consigning of this passage of Scripture to the category "ahistory", they must naturally reject the birth history of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But, "No!" I hear you say, "Because, the other gospel accounts testify to the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ." Nay, Nay, I say because John Dickson and his disciples have introduced an anti-Reformation methodology for interpreting Scripture. They will not allow Exodus 20:11 and Exodus 31:17 help interpret Genesis 1 so they cannot allow the other gospel accounts to help interpret the circumstance of the appearance of Jesus Christ on earth, let alone in human form.
This dog's breakfast theology is set to drive the Sydney Episcopalian Diocese into oblivion. Take warning!
Sam
Well such was the circumstance when I found a book in my cupboard written by F.C. Payne as the 14th edition in 1978. The book is called "The Seal of God". In his book, the author goes into much detail about the significance of numbers in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. The author presents his case that the high concentration of number sequences in both the Hebrew and Greek testify to the Divine inspiration of Scripture and the utilization of various authors over more than a millennium and who, by separation of time, could not have contrived their writings to present such unity of number sequences. I don't know the theology of F.C. Payne and I have not, in the past, made use of his propositions in my theology. I do note now, though, that nowhere does he deny the historicity of Scripture because of number sequences etc contained therein.
Contrast Payne's position with that of John Dickson and his disciples in the Sydney Episcopalian Diocese. These folk see number sequences, in particular the recurrence of the number seven (7), and automatically their brain slips into autodrive repeating "ahistorical", "ahistorical".
Well, in the sight of F.C Payne at least, for John Dickson and his disciples to be thoroughly consistent in their theology they must dismiss the wealth of historical narrative of Scripture widely accepted by the Church.
For example, the ministry of John the Baptist recorded in Mark 1: 1-8 and in John must, be rejected as history because of its overuse of the number seven (7). F.C. Payne provides the following:
"The words number 126 (18-7's)
And the syllables are 294 (42-7's)
The words in the vocabulary number 77 (sum 14) (11-7's)
The letters in the vocabulary number 427 (61-7's)
The vowels in the 427 letters are 224 (32-7's)
The consonants 203 (29-7's)
The vocabulary words used by John are 21 (3-7's)
Which leaves 56 (8-7's)
Those beginning with a vowel are 42 (6-7's)
Those beginning with a consonant 35 (5-7's)"
Payne also applies his mind to the birth of Christ recorded in Matthew 1: 18-25:
"The number of Greek words is exactly 161 (23-7's)
The numeric value of these is exactly 93,394 (13,342-7's)
The number of vocabulary words is exactly 77 (11-7's)
The numeric value of these is exactly 51,247 (7,321-7's)
Here we have a perfect, double, interlocked design covering every word and letter,which must remain constant, whilst the following designs are woven into it, and not a single letter can be altered:
There are six Greek words which are found nowhere else in Matt.
Their numeric value is exactly 5,005 (715-7's)
These six Greek words have exactly 56 letters (8-7's)
Now the first two verses, a natural division, (6-7's)
having exactly 42 words leaving 119 (17-7's)
The last verse, another natural division,
has exactly 14 words (2-7's)
leaving 147 (3-7's of 7's)
Again, the 161 words occur in 105 forms (15-7's)
The numeric value of these forms is exactly 65,429 (9,347-7's)
In these 105 forms are exactly 35 verbs (5-7's)
There are exactly 7 Proper names (7)
The number of letters in these 7 names is exactly 42 (6-7's)
There is one word 'Emanuel' used nowhere else
in the N.T.; its numeric value is 644 (92-7's)
The sum of its figures is 14 (2-7's)
Their numeric value is exactly 8,715 (1,245-7's)
Now we have another remarkable occurrence.
The angel speaks to Joseph, and although his words
form another pattern of their own, they fit exactly
into the whole!
In speaking to Joseph the angel uses of the 77 vocabulary
words exactly 28 (4-7's)
The numeric value of all the angel's words is
exactly 21,042 (3,006-7's)
The angel uses exactly 35 forms (5-7's)
These 35 forms have exactly 168 letters (24-7's)
The numeric value of these letters is
exactly 19,397 (2,771-7's)
Now the angel in using exactly 28 of the
vocabulary words leaves exactly 49 (7-7's)
In using exactly 35 forms he leaves exactly 70 (10-7's)
The sum of the figures 70 is 7, and its factors
7 + 2 + 5 is 14 (2-7's)
This by no means exhausts the passage but enough has been
shown here to show us that the design in it is not there by chance."
In light of the stance taken by John Dickson and his disciples on Genesis 1 - its high usage of the number 7 - and their subsequent consigning of this passage of Scripture to the category "ahistory", they must naturally reject the birth history of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But, "No!" I hear you say, "Because, the other gospel accounts testify to the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ." Nay, Nay, I say because John Dickson and his disciples have introduced an anti-Reformation methodology for interpreting Scripture. They will not allow Exodus 20:11 and Exodus 31:17 help interpret Genesis 1 so they cannot allow the other gospel accounts to help interpret the circumstance of the appearance of Jesus Christ on earth, let alone in human form.
This dog's breakfast theology is set to drive the Sydney Episcopalian Diocese into oblivion. Take warning!
Sam
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
