Bully's Blog

And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: “Blessed… Blessed…”
(Matthew 5:2-11)

Part 1 is here.

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or Shekinah People

“The solution here is not, as Calvin believed, to dress the New Covenant’s ethical maturity in the puerile clothing of paedobaptism.”

In The Failure of the American Baptist Culture [PDF], James Jordan, Ray Sutton and others expose the rot at the heart of baptistic theology, which is inherently man-centred. The authors call us from a view of salvation in isolation to a wider vision of the meaning of baptism, which signifies the broader realities of the Covenant of Grace. I learned a great deal about history and Reformed theology, and thoroughly recommend it to you. In my view, however, they don’t go far enough. A call to understand the vital historical connection between circumcision and baptism certainly deals with the errors of the Anabaptists, but when rightly understood, the progressive nature of revelation also exposes the use of paedobaptism as a connection with the Old Covenant as entirely bogus.

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“In Genesis 1, God creates the world in six days, through certain steps. Then He creates human beings out of ‘world,’ and human beings made out of world are going to live like ‘world’ does. They are going to go from darkness to light, formlessness to form; they are going to marry and take dominion. They are going to become like lights ruling over the earth. They’re going to live in 24 hour cycles. They will undergo times when God pulls them apart and puts them back together in new ways–all because they are made out of world. And these are all steps of glorification.” — James B. Jordan (The Bible You Never Read)

Some Christians assert that Adam was not the first man, only the first man in Covenant with God. [1] This means that the judgments upon such a Covenant could only be social, not “Creational.” They could only fall upon those under Covenant, not the “pre-Adamic” people from which this Covenant separated Adam. This assertion must be made to support the view that the Great Flood was only a local event, destroying only the “Adamites,” not all people on the planet. Does this assertion have any support in Scripture? Apparently yes, but factually no.

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Micah Martin (brother of one of the authors of Beyond Creation Science), has kindly read Bible Matrix II and written about my adherence to the Genesis account of Creation as both Covenant and history (i.e. the account is not simply an account of the physical world being given a Covenantal purpose as a Temple, but also its actual Creation). There is much that we agree on, but the disagreement on this subject couldn’t be sharper, or of more importance.

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or Ulterior Motifs

Jesus’ reference to sun, moon and stars in Matthew 24 has nothing to do with the physical world, and everything to do with the microcosmic world of the Temple. Because of this, the Covenant Creationists think Genesis 1 is only about the Covenant with Adam, not about physical creation. They’re wrong, just as the literalists are wrong about Matthew 24 predicting the end of the world.

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Daniel Harrell tries to marry chalk and cheese by positing that Adam and Eve were real people, just not the first real people. They were the first people with whom God entered into a Covenant relationship.[1] The Rev. Harrell is sitting on the fence, an extremely pointy fence.

For many Christians, the biblical characters Adam and Eve can present a significant challenge to accepting evolutionary theory—that is, when they are cast as historical figures who are also the biological progenitors of the human race. …the Rev. Daniel Harrell discusses how there may be some “middle ground” in the way that Christians understand Adam and Eve. Harrell points out that the historicity of Adam and Eve does not necessarily conflict with science.  Rather, the claim that conflicts with science is the idea that Adam and Eve were the first humans, who were the only original biological ancestors of all humans today.

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]
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or Playing Poison with Genesis 1

You know how it is when you read one of your favourite theologians and they come up with a real clanger? It’s yes, wow, yes, I’m with you, and then the train of thought jumps the tracks—at least as far as you, the reader, are concerned. It’s like me reading a good Presbyterian who without any warning flies off the wall and marries chalk and cheese to prove the Bible teaches infant baptism. Or it’s you reading this blog watching me fly off the wall every now and then (but it’s all completely logical in my mind—believe me! Bully is never wrong!)

Anyhow, J. L. Vaughan, a “Covenant Creationist” on the AV forum pointed out this article by Brian Godawa, who is both a theologian and a screenwriter. I have featured Brian’s articles on the Abrahamic Covenant, Matthew 24 and Daniel 9 on my old The Last Days page. He is logical and easy to understand. And he’s a preterist. But then he jumps the tracks (as far as I’m concerned) and goes and parrots this drivel:

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A couple of guys have written a book called Beyond Creation Science. As preterists, they understand there was a symbolic ‘flood’ across the Land of Israel under both Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon and Nero/Vespasian’s Rome. Problem is, they read this back into Noah’s flood and try to say that this was only a local flood, which then allows them to compromise with old-earth Creationism.

It was ‘long-age’ geological assumptions that provided a ‘foundation’ for Darwin’s long-age biological fantasy. I would recommend Tas Walker’s site, Biblical Geology, for someone who really knows his stuff.

The position of these fellows causes more problems than it fixes. It makes the Bible’s very detailed chronology a joke, and forces a gap of millions of years into Genesis 1.

Here’s the solution:

Adam’s failure brought physical de-Creation. Cain founded a corrupt civilisation whose evil influence triumphed and was destroyed in a literal flood. Just like Cain, Ham was cursed, and his son Canaan’s influence led to social de-Creation. As God raised new land out of the waters after the flood, God would now perform another Creation miracle. In calling Abram, God was socially dividing the waters of the nations into the Land and the Sea. The era of the patriarchs, ruling fathers, began. God called Abram, and tore the world in two.

The land and sea division was a literal, physical land and sea in early Genesis. The ark of Noah was a literal ’world-in-a-box’, a safehouse and doorway to a new world. But when God called Abram, the ‘Land and Sea’ division was purely social, and the Tabernacle and Temple were a symbolic ‘world-in-a-box.’ These guys have confused these two and unwittingly undermined the authority of Scripture.

[Also, on hyperpreterist ‘Covenant Creationism’, see A Chronic Hysteresis.]