Good point–I agree that Genesis was not trying to address a scientific question. @DOL Dr Lamoureux came to that point prior to entering his evolutionary biology studies, while he was still at Regent College, I think. However, I’m thinking of the concordance to the details of the “raqiyya,” and so on. In Frost and Kilmer, they know what they’re using are pictures–just as I used to say to my kids, “The sun is rising,” but I knew that I was lying, so to speak. However, if I understand correctly, the principles in Genesis, with the 4 Ancient Near East motifs of 4 motifs of De Novo Creation, Lost Idyllic Age, Great Flood, and Tribal Formation (with a founding male), are trappings that the ANE would recognize, but definitely are not scientific. I felt that the science and the Bible had to be concordant.
Honestly, I still struggle with accommodationism, too. In a way, it feels uncomfortable, trying to filter out what is not correct.
However, I think that it does boil down to God being fair–He doesn’t really care too much about whether we get it right. He has more important things on His mind–like acting like His son–so that’s ok!
It’s not a comfortable place to me–but I think that I can really be a slippery slope either way.
But there are more issues than that that I don’t really feel solid on. I keep coming back to Rich Mullins’ “We Are Not As Strong As We Think We Are,” and give both myself and others space to make errors and learn; and trust in good intent–which I think we all really do have. I think you have a ton more Bible study than I do, and definitely teach me.
Here’s a perspective: skip all the sections about warfare where Israel was supposed to wipe out entire peoples. The result leaves no clash at all between the two Testaments.
This is why scholars on several translation teams have said that the core of the Old Testament is the word חֶסֶד (khe-sed), which the translators of the Revise Standard Version said was the hardest word to translate. In various versions it is rendered “lovingkindness”, “steadfast love”, “covenant love”, loving faithfulness", and “great mercy”, though according to most scholars none of these is quite sufficient.
Skipping those warfare sections may seem like cheating, but it really isn’t because there are in a sense two different stories going on side by side. The first story is of God’s relation to His people, and that’s the story where חֶסֶד is the theme; the second story is if God’s campaign to wipe out all traces of descendants of the offspring of heavenly beings and human women. The first is the story of how Yahweh wants things to be, the second is the story of eliminating something that wasn’t supposed to happen.
Of course both stories are part of the greater story which is about Yahweh’s intention to have all peoples on Earth as His people; it’s just harder to see that in the warfare side of things. The two come together in the Psalms and the Prophets to point towards the Messiah, so both end up directing our attention to Jesus.
I don’t see the issue, personally; the question is “What does the text intend to teach?” I doubt there’s a place in the OT where the details matter in terms of being “correct”. It’s far more useful to look at how the original audience would have heard the message; you don’t have to filter out anything, you just read it taking it seriously the way they would have.
Sometimes that requires some serious scholarship, but there are a lot of good scholars (e.g. Dr. Michael Heiser) who go into more depth than most people will ever need; he goes into bits that even a serious student of Hebrew can learn from (for example in Exodus 6:3, which I’ve read in the Hebrew before, he made a point about the grammar that I never slowed down enough to read).
Here is the conclusion of a poem shared by Brian Zahnd in his “Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God.”
(Thanks for referencing that work, Randy - I’m finding it very insightful, and a needed call back to Christ. Though I’m not done reading it yet, I’ll be curious what sorts of things in it provoked concern for you.)
…So understand the medium, and don’t try so hard to miss the point
Try to learn what matters and what doesn’t
It’s not where and when Job lived But what Job learned
In his painful odyssey and poetic theodicy
It’s not how many cubits of water you need to put Everest under a flood
But why the world was so dirty that it needed such a big bath
Trying to find Noah’s ark Instead of trying to rid the world of violence
Really is an exercise in missing the point
Speaking of missing the point— It’s not did a snake talk? But what the d*mn thing said!
Because even though I’ve never met a talking snake I’ve sure had serpentine thoughts crawl through my head
Literalism is a kind of escapism By which you move out of the crosshairs of the probing question
But parable and metaphor have a way of knocking us to the floor
Prose-flattened literalism makes the story small, time-confined, and irrelevant
But poetry and allegory travel through time and space to get in our face
Inert facts are easy enough to set on the shelf
But the Story well-told will haunt you
Ah, the Story well-told
That’s what is needed It’s time for the Story to bust out of the cage and take the stage
And demand a hearing once again It’s a STORY, I tell you!
And if you allow the Story to seep into your life
So that THE STORY begins to weave into your story
That’s when, at last, you’re reading the Bible right
Zahnd, Brian. Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News (p. 75). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Merv, thanks for another inspired book. I’ve checked it out and am enjoying what I’m reading. Here is a highly condensed excerpt from pp 10-12 from the book:
… I also discovered a number of things abut my Christian tradition that had not been apparent to me while I was busy upholding it.
Chief among these is the way [it] thrives on dividing reality into opposing pairs: good/evil, church/world; spirit/flesh, sacred/profane, light/dark. Even if you are not Christian it should be easy to tell which half of each pair is “higher” and which “lower”. In every case, the language of oppositions works by placing half of reality closer to God and the other half farther away. This not only simplifies life for people who do not want to spend a lot of time thinking about whether the divisions really hold; it also offers them a strong sense of purpose by giving them daily battles to engage in. The more they win out over the world of the flesh, the better. …
After years of using this language to pray, teach, preach, and celebrate the sacraments, I fell out of love with it - not just the words themselves but also the vision of reality they represent. …
…Of course, my language evolved through the years as I became more mature in faith, but the essential worldview did not change. Even after I found a church that affirms the goodness of creation as much as any I know, Sunday worship still turned on the axis of blood sacrifice, which made the death of the body the way of eternal life. …
…It was not until much later, after I had resigned from saying these words on a regular basis, that they began to sound lame. Their explanation for what was wrong with me was no longer a relief but an ongoing source of injury. Their description of divine reality no longer struck with the force of revelation but resounded with the clang of a truth claim that bore closer inspection. Saying them over and over again in a sacred place, it had been possible to overlook the way they divided people in two, teaching us over and over again that we had two minds, two natures, two sets of loyalties, two homes - and that only one was close to God. Too much of this made a person crazy.
"Jesus teaches the paradox that self-denial is self-affirmation. (Matt. 16:25). It’s just that the “self” and the “affirmation” are defined by God, not by our fallible human whims. Who we are (children of God) and what it means for us to be fulfilled (union with Christ) isn’t up to us. To be with Christ is to be without our selfish desires.
So we must ask: what does it mean to deny ourselves? It means that we turn from sin. All sin is the act of choosing our own path against God’s will for us. It is a perverse affirmation of the self which puts its desires ahead of our neighbor and even God.
– from a Christianity Today newsletter
I was reminded of a situation when I was running cross-country in high school: I’d just made the JV team, and coach was correcting the way I ran, and I commented that the way he wanted me to put down my feet hurt. He said something to the effect of “That may be, but you’ll run faster”.
Changing habits to do something more correctly or better – or at all, sometimes! – can involve pain, but it will help us “run faster”.
That states exactly what I’ve done a weak job of trying to say a number of times here when I’ve noted that YEC throws away the actual messages of the opening Creation story. Awesome quote.
“Cheerfulness, without humor, is a very trying thing.”
–Father Brown, in GK Chesterton, “The Three Tools of Death.”
I think that this refers to how becoming too wrapped up in a given cause, without the humility and temperance from humor, can be dictatorial and unmerciful.
In the story, a teetotaler evangelical became depressed. His own fundamentalism took away others’ joy, and finally caused his own depression.
It’s a great reflection for me to consider, too. How much does humility and laughing at ourselves remind us of God’s grace!
Listening to the Holy Post has resulted in more book purchases (by me personally) than any other influencers I can think of! And my latest intended purchase now, will be “The Gift of Disillusionment” [“Land of My Sojourn”] by Mike Cosper, as a result of hearing him interviewed on the Holy Post. I was particularly impressed by what he said, around 1:38 - 1:40 or so in, which I will attempt to replicate below …
…You create this fantasy world that you’re living in when you’re in ministry … It’s the grandiose story … “we’re gonna change the city … we’re gonna reach the nations…” and all those kinds of things. And what you do when you tell yourself that story over and over again is “here’s the destination … here’s what it’s all for” and no matter how bad it gets, you have that idealized vision of what you’re gonna achieve on the other side of it. And so it’s like ‘yeah, this is really hard! … It hurts that those relationships got severed … what happened to that person who was serving in ministry next to you was really unfortunate … but ultimately we’re all going after this same thing and we’re all on the same page - everyone’s well-intended, and it’s all gonna be good when we get there." When you reach this place where you start to go ‘well wait a minute! Maybe we’re not actually gonna get to that place and maybe we’re not all well-intended, and maybe we’re not all on the same page and on the same journey!’ … the most terrifying thing in the world is to accept that reality! Because then, you have all these stories you’ve told yourself. I can live with this collateral damage and that collateral damage and this wound and that personal sacrifice or whatever because the destination made all of those difficult choices worth it. But if you have to sort of accept the reality that the destination itself wasn’t real … that the dream in a sense was not achievable, … so for instance in the book I liken this to the life of Peter and Peter’s vision for what the Kingdom of God was going to be, vs. Jesus’ vision for what the Kingdom of God was gonna be. And the gap between those realities … like … I have spent a few years trying to write this book … I still don’t think I can fully comprehend how wide that gap was! But I think it’s a good metaphor for the kinds of gaps that we all eventually encounter with the idealized thing that we think we’re gonna become and we think our ministries are gonna become or whatever … and then the reality of like ‘Oh - we’re just a church!’ … ‘Oh - we’re just a bunch of people … you know’ … some of us are really jacked up! Some of us have really hurt each other. Some of us have done a lot of damage. So there’s not this utopia on the other side of that! Now you’ve gotta clean up a lot of stuff. And you’ve gotta start dealing with all those other wounds, including your own.
And later they go on to discuss Peter’s story and how he handled the destruction of his illusions.
All of that is direly needed reality-speak to those of us in ministry/service professions. But the line that really captivates me above was his confession (which speaks for me too) that even with his eyes fully on this problem, and even having written a book about it - he knows that he’s still struggling to even just grasp for himself the wideness of the gap between Peter’s initial vision and Jesus’ vision for what the Kindom of God is to be!
Yes! That.
The only line of Cosper’s I would dispute was his following thought that … ‘this gap (between Peter and Jesus) is a good metaphor for the kinds of gaps we face…’ I respond instead that I don’t think it’s a metaphor at all! Mike is being too modestly understated here. That gap is literally the thing itself that we all are facing. Nothing metaphorical about it.
I’d say cheerfulness without joy is nigh unto impossible. I once went a good half year without laughing or being able to laugh and was unable to be cheerful, but it was a moment of joy that brought those back (that moment being the first time in a couple of years that I could speak the word “home” with any content to it).
And yet when I’ve cracked under the pressure from holding to ‘the destination’ I end up, when I’m on my feet again, just shifting the destination . . . and cracking again.
I have to keep reminding myself, now that I’m doing conservation work, that there is no way to reach my imagined destination, that I can’t even make sure that every tree I plant will make it through its first summer, or I get so discouraged I just stare at whatever I should be doing and can’t make decisions at all.
I’m working on a bibliography at work related to R. J. Oppenheimer and the bomb - to go with the Oscars. I get to use things like the International Guide to Periodical Literature (annual indexes like some of us will remember) and the printed pers that go with them.
I took this photo of Lewis’s poem in The Spectator (London) December 28, 1945.
I saw the first end of the Cold War, like many of us here. I am not glad to see it revived. I read this after supper with The Youngest, and I appreciated Lewis’s perspective.
It reminds me of a letter to the editor Lewis wrote during WWII in response to an assertion that the death rate was abominably high: he pointed out that the death rate remained one per person, with a certain exception about 30 A.D.
