No God, No Science: Michael Hanby

This may be old news for some, but thought this was both an interesting autobiographical account of an academic journey and also a really fascinating and important project. Enjoy

Michael Hanby's book is on Amazon and kindle, if I ever get round to reading it, I'll let you know!

Theology of Hospitality

I'm preaching on Acts 16:11-15 this morning, and although I think the main point of the passage is Paul's multiple boundary crossing acceptance of Lydia, it's got me thinking too about hospitality - a notable subtheme of Luke/Acts.  here is a quick sketch of a biblical theology of hospitality, I'm sure more could be added, please do so in the comments!

Creation - In the biblical account of creation God is portrayed as the divine host making a home for all earth's creatures and providing them with food.

Israel - In the desert God hosts his people on their pilgrimage, providing water, bread and meat.  At the same time he teaches them to host him, by providing a tabernacle and sacrifices they play host to God.

Incarnation - Jesus' first act is to be a guest of someone else, and throughout his ministry as an itinerant preacher he is dependent on the hospitality of others, his gratuitous "guesting" brings him criticism (friend of sinners) but was a central part of his message.  But in the feeding of the 5,000 and 4,000, in the miraculous provision of fish or even a room to share passover Jesus reveals himself as host, echoing both Gods hosting in creation and in the exodus.  In giving himself upon the cross Jesus offers us his own body (John 6, 1 Cor 11) and in his triumph over death prepares a home for all God's people to live as God's guests (John 14, Rev 21).

Eschatology - Isaiah 25 promises a divinely provided feast for all nations, while Matt 22 uses the image of a wedding feast with God as host to describe the kingdom.

Ecclesiology - So as God's people a key spiritual discipline is to image, enact and embody both God's hospitality and God's condescension as guest, in sharing bread and wine, in opening our homes to strangers, in being willingly dependent on the hospitality of others (esp in mission), in giving thanks for the gifts of creation and in sharing them with an open hand.

⁶ On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare
   a feast of rich food for all peoples,
a banquet of aged wine—
   the best of meats and the finest of wines.
⁷ On this mountain he will destroy
   the shroud that enfolds all peoples,
the sheet that covers all nations;
 ⁸ he will swallow up death forever.
The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears
   from all faces;
he will remove the disgrace of his people
   from all the earth.
            The LORD has spoken. (Isaiah 25)

God Changes The Past All The Time

Roger Olsen has an interesting post wondering why calvinists don't think it limits God if he cannot change the past.  But both Olsen and his calvinist sparring partners are wrong, God changes the past all the time, it is just no one ever notices because he changes our memories too! 

However, there are some tell tale signs that this goes on more than we realise.  For example, thousands of years ago when Moses wrote Genesis the world had only taken 6 days to make, but today if you examine the planet and its surrounding environs you can see it took around 40 Billion years to make.  Or if you read ancient documents you would see that the Sun used to rise up in the sky and go down at night, but today it is Earth which rolls around the Sun.  The only possible explanation is that what used to be really was then, but then it got changed retrospectively and now we are living with a new version of the past.  QED.

Of course the nice thing about having a changeable past is that when we argue about what really happened back then, we can both be right!  And as far as I remember I never lent you that $20.

brick-a-brack 06/01/11

 Cartoon from ASBO Jesus

• Doug Chaplin (UK) complains about American imports (namely creationism)
• Staurt points out a UK report on converts to Islam
• While Jason Hood talks about loving our Muslim neighbours (HT Bird)
• Michael Horton discusses Jesus and Paul
• Marc Cortez calls for more pastor theologians
• Jonathan Fitzgerald calls for more appreciation for the critics of Christianity
• Jeremy starts a new series on using videos in teaching about the Bible

NT Wright on being "Literal"

This is well worth sharing, not least for the first 30 seconds where Wright explains the difference between literal and metaphorical, and concrete and abstract.



Hat Tip

God Came From Nowhere

A recreation of a S.M. Lockridge sermon by an actor, which starts with a genius meditation on creation ex nihilo (out from nothing).  Poetry, theology and preaching, a beautiful combination.

Hauerwas on Death

Reflections on Death from CPX on Vimeo.

HT RB

Or if you feel more like meditating on the beginning of life try
Coakley on God, Providence and the Evolutionary Phenomenom of Creation (HT JMG)

Some more observations on Genesis 1-3

I am hoping to do a proper study on Genesis later this year for all sorts of reasons (do I need a reason?) but had a few thoughts last night while reading and this is a good place to drop them down, till later. 

So two very different creation narratives put next to each other and of course it is often observed that things happen in the opposite order.  In the first one the order of creation is plants, animals, humans.  In the second it is man, plants, animals, woman.  By wodging (a technical term!) the two narratives together two things happen. 

1. A chiasm of sorts is created around the Sabbath which is bookended on either side by the creation of man.  Could this be significant?
2. In the first story creation is completed by the creation of humanity, both male and female, but in the second creation is only completed by the creation of woman.  Both stories place the creation of a whole humanity (both genders) as the telos of creation.  What is the compound effect of these two narratives with such high anthropologies?

The other point is that last time I made some observations on Genesis ETB suggested that the serpent might have been a winged beast rather than a legged one.  But that seems contrary to the text's designation of the serpent as a חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה (beast of the field, 3:1) as opposed to a כָּל־עֹוף הַשָּׁמַיִם (bird of the air, cf. 2:19).  So the old saw about the snake 'not having a leg to stand on', still stands, if you catch my drift. :-)

No, you don't just pick and choose

As I stated before this inerrancy discussion has plenty of legs left. Glenn responds to some criticism from Jeremy by asking why is a non-inerrantist more likley to allow personal preference to interfere in interpretation that someone who holds to inerrancy?  Glenn is quite right in pointing out that we all have to do the hard work of interpretation regardless of what our particular position is.  In fact I would go as far as to say that inerrantists have a harder time of it because of the need they feel to reconcile passages which (appear to) disagree in minor details.  For the non-inerrantist this is normally going to be a waste of time. 

But Jeremy seems to think that it is just a matter of opinion which "parts" of the of Bible are intended to teach truth and which parts are a result of the texts time and culture bound character.  Jeremy paints in his post a misleading charicature of those who do not hold to inerrancy.  No serious exegete that I know thinks you can just put a red biro around various parts of the Bible that you think might contain mistakes or errors or even just irrelevances.  Rather the whole text is inspired, and the whole text has a message.  The important thing is not to confuse the medium with the message.  The mistakes are not in the Bible (hence why I would never say the Bible is "errant" or contains errors - pace Glenn) but in the interpreters who think that the medium is part of the message. 

The clearest and most obvious example of this is Genesis chapter 1.  This passage clearly is teaching about God and the relationship of creation and humanity to God.  There is huge theological weight to every verse in Gen 1 and it is (in my belief) totally and utterly true in all that it teaches.  But there is no indication in the text that it intends to teach us about evoution (or lack of it) or the age of the planet (or lack of it).  Yes that is a hermeneutical decision you have to make, but you do not make those decisions based on preference, you make it based on the way the text demands to be read in its literary and historical context.  The poetic form, and seven days structure are the medium within which the message of God's creativity, sovereignty and grace are taught to us, not the message itself.

Jeremy also argues that because inerrancy now means almost anything given how widely it is qualified by different people that if you feel unable to affirm it then there must be something wrong with you.  My only answer to such a startling suggestion is that I don't believe we should just redefine words to suit us for the express purpose of fitting in with a certain group of people (in this case those who affirm inerrancy - regardless of what they actually mean by it!).  If anything he proves my earlier point that talk about inerrancy is just plain meaningless.

What's the drama and who's the snake?

Thanks to James McGrath for lovely quote which inspires me to make two observations about Gen 2-3.

1. The suspense of Gen 2:18-20 relies on the reader not having read Gen 1:26-28.  The way the story is being told the audience are expected not to know what partner might be found for the man.  But Gen 1:26-28 has already given it away, man goes with woman and the two of them are supposed to "go forth and multiply."  Thus the suspense and resolution of Gen 2:18-25, which arrives at essentially the same answers by a different route makes no sense if treated as part of a continuous narrative with Gen 1.  The two creation accounts should not be harmonized but read as alternative accounts.  This is not because I feel the need to do this to satisfy some modernist need to justify my enjoyment of and adherence to these ancient myths, but because the text (which I believe is God's word) actually demands it. 


2. The serpent is introduced in 3:1 as being "more crafty than any other wild animal that God had made."  Because of this, and the resultant loss of limb for said serpent in 2:14, I have never understood the ease with which this chatty little reptile is conflated with Satan and the Devil.  To do so takes the story out of the category of myth and into allegory.  If it is allegorical then why do we need to get so excited about whether or not it is historical?  This also makes it hard for me to accept that in Gen 3:15 we find the proto-euangelion.  To me 3:15 is simply a folksy explanation of why snakes are nasty.  The true proto-euangelion is, IMHO at least, Gen 12:1-3 and it would seem that here the Apostle Paul agrees with me (cf. Gal 3:8, which might count for something with some people).


Let me know what you think :-)

NT Wright on Reality

Reality as we know it is the result of a creator god bringing into being a world that is other than himself, and yet which is full of his glory. It was always the intention of this god that creation should one day be flooded with his own life, in a way for which it was prepared from the beginning. As part of the means to this end, the creator brought into being a creature which, by bearing the creator's image, would bring his wise and loving care to bring upon the creation. By a tragic irony, the creature in question has rebelled against this intention. But the creator has solved this problem in principle in an entirely appropriate way, and as a result is now moving creation once more towards its originally intended goal. The implementation of this solution now involves the indwelling of this god within his human creatures and ultimately within the whole creation, transforming it into that for which it was made in the beginning.

[NT Wright, NTPG, 97-8]

One thing I like to do with groups who want a Bible overview is to get them to describe what they think the big story (metanarrative) of the Bible is in five or six sentences. It is always really interesting to see what they come out with. (Wright is deliberate here in not mentioning Jesus only because the next two books in the series are on the subject and he didn't want to preempt himself.) It is a good excercise to do. Of course for Wright, as for many Christians, the metanarrative of the Bible describes reality itself and our own personal stories find their true context and meaning only within that. I quite like Wright's summary (apart from the ommission of Jesus and his unqualified use of the male third person pronoun for God), it is concise and simple and effectively highlights three of the most important characters of the biblical story, God, creation, and humanity. What I think is missing from this summary is God's people, but then it is only a summary, you can't include everything. Interesting, too, how in a six sentence summary the first four of those sentences cover Genesis 1-11 while the last two cover Gen 12 -Rev 22!!

Why don't you have a go? Let me know what you think :-)

Believe the Bible or Science?

One of the more frustrating conversations to have is when you try and suggest that the scientific theory of evolution does not really contradict the creation accounts of Genesis. It doesn't matter if you are talking to a young earth creationist fundy or a frothing at the mouth anti-theist, they both think that you are trying to wriggle out of the 'plain meaning' of scripture. The argument really runs either:

1. people have always read creation accounts as literal scientific historical accounts and you are just trying to change that because of the proof for evolution
2. if you are not going to take the creation accounts literally then you cannot take the gospels literally either

Both are simply based on false assumptions about the nature of the texts concerned and the history of their interpretation.

The most obvious reason for thinking that even the original prescientific authors and readers of the creation accounts did not take them in the same way that we do a scientific historical account (apart from the fact that science and history as we understand them were not relevant concepts to these people) is that they provide two totally different accounts right next to each other. In Genesis 1, the world is made in seven days in a particular order, in Gen 2 it is made in one day (or age) in a totally different order. There are many more interesting differences between each account, but I think the point is made.

Then there is the history of interpretation. In fact the literal scientific (read literalistic) reading of Genesis is a relatively modern idea. Christianity Today recently ran a very useful article describing Augustine's interpretation of the creation accounts. Augustine's issue was not evolution, but the doctrine of creation from nothing (which was in those days considered scientifically absurd, but these days sounds remarkably similar to some understandings of the big bang). But he shows that even long before Darwin the creation accounts in scripture were not being understood in a literal scientific historical manner. It is actually young earth creationism which is the novelty.

The creation accounts are sources of theological truth, and careful reading of them shows what their theological concerns are. While they express theology, they make no attempt to answer the questions of science. The complaint that this then disallows a historical reading of the gospels stems in turn from a misunderstanding of the literary nature of the Bible. That is, the Bible, although usually packaged as such, is not one book. It is a collection of ancient books each of which need to be approached slightly differently depending on the type of book it is. If you try and interpret a letter to a dysfunctional church (e.g. 1 Corinthians) in the same way you do an erotic poem (e.g. Song of Solomon) you will become unstuck pretty fast, for reasons which i hope are obvious. The gospels, while not historical accounts as we would understand a modern historical account to be, are intended to be eyewitness accounts of actual historical events. While this by no means proves their accuracy or reliability (that is for another day), it does demand that they be interpreted differently to the stories of creation, and means that someone (like me) committed to the truth of the Bible, is not being inconsistent when they accept evolution (as science not as worldview) but also believe in the literal historical resurrection.

Science, properly understood is not in opposition to faith. Science is merely the observation of the world around us. Science can prove things, in the sense that it on the basis of all the observations we can make (taxonomy, DNA, etc) evolution appears to be the process by which the world has arrived at this wonderful array of diverse forms of life. But Science cannot disprove or prove the resurrection which is by its very nature outside the realm of the observable and repeatable. Neither can science answer the questions of purpose and ethics, although it can inform them. So I don't believe science, but I do accept the observations of scientists. The problems arise when some scientists try and argue the implications of their observations in regard to things outside of their domain of expertise. Science is neither an argument for or against God. Rather it is an exploration of the world that God has given us. The fact that it only gets more interesting and complicated with each new discovery should not surprise or dismay us, it is just further evidence of the greatness of the Creator.

sorry couldn't resist

Rocking around the Christmas tree

And while we're on the subject of the Earth probably being a little older than 6 thousand years or so... check out this book review of a book that I spotted in the shops the other day, it starts like this:

"Saying that The Bible, Rocks and Time: Geological Evidence for the Age of the Earth by Davis A. Young and Ralph F. Stearley (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2008) is probably the best book of its kind would not be saying enough, since there really is no other book of its kind: a treatment of the varied and overwhelmingly consistent evidence for the antiquity of our planet, written by Evangelical Christians with the aim of not only making the scientific case for the age of the Earth, but also helping conservative Christian readers navigate the issues of theology and Biblical interpretation that go along with such a conclusion, and all the while pointing out the difficulties and at times dishonesty of the young-earth creationist position."

ooooh!

Evangelicals and Evolution

Here is a blog which I was following a little last year in which an Evangelical Christian argues the case for and works out the consequences of accepting the modern theory of evolution. Although I do think this is a very important issue it is not one I feel I have the time to get stuck into at the moment. However I bring this to your attention as the author of the blog has just compiled the last two years of blogging and contributions to the blog into 5 ebooks which are available free from links on the blog. Titles rather enticingly include : 'evolution and original sin' and 'the social psychology of the origins debate.' Enjoy :-)