Bully's Blog

“Getting Genesis 1 wrong, capitulating to the worldview and resulting pseudo-science and pseudo-history of darkened minds, will eventually lead you to get Genesis 2 wrong as well.”

[Addendum added below for those who are not familiar with my biblical-theological framework. This post is not really about the complementarian debate. It is about our modern ignorance of biblical structure and process.]

Sydney Anglicans used to have an online forum for discussion of theology. It was a great way to spend a few hours I didn’t have. From those times, two things stick in my mind: the creation/evolution thread that would not die, and one commenter who denied that compromising on a particular controversial issue would lead the compromisers down the proverbial “slippery slope.”

Since I called people names this week, very ungraciously, perhaps it might help if I explained myself a little. I see the interpretation of early Genesis as crucial for our interpretation of the rest of the Bible, but also for our understanding of the world we live in. If a Christian gives in to whatever the prevailing culture demands, there will be ramifications for the rest of his theology. This is because the Bible is fractal in its nature. It is a closely knit network, a carefully constructed grid, just like the created world. To cave on one issue will have outcomes in other areas of theology, and the example I have in mind right now is John Dickson, a brave, educated and wise Christian apologist.

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John Dickson does a great job of showing how rubbish and pants the apocryphal “gospels” are, but he still believes that the real ones were written decades after the actual events. James Jordan has written some very convincing arguments concerning the Jewish practice of getting things into print almost immediately (a culture where not everyone reads and writes is not the same as an oral culture), but it seems the very names of people in the Gospels supports early dates of composition. Craig J. Hazen writes:
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“Human beings are animals whose preference for group membership is simultaneously the source of their greatest salvation and their ultimate destruction” —Xenocrates

Who has the majority of evidence to support their paradigm? Is it the Young Earth Creationists or the (mostly atheistic) Evolutionists? (Please note that as far as I am concerned, anyone else is just sitting on a very sharp fence trying to hide the pain with clever words.)

The Old Earthers, whatever their stripe (from Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens to certain young Sydney Anglicans I admire and the misguided mob at BioLogos), despite their bluff, rely on hearsay and circular reasoning. Creationist cosmologist Russell Humphreys writes:

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or How Modern Conservative Theologians Unwittingly Use Literary Genres to Mask Their Unbelief 

One of the big problems with modern theology is its habit of categorising parts of the Bible into literary genres. For sure, the Bible contains historical prose, visions, poetry and songs. But many passages won’t actually fit into these neat little pigeon holes without hamstringing their intended purpose. And as it turns out, these “genre-lisations” are excuses to compromise with humanistic pop-philosophy and pop-history.

The three main gripes I have are misuses of the genres poetry, polemic and apocalyptic.

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