Saturday, July 29, 2006

Of Jordan on Genesis

1. Notice that Jordan has assumed that the division of light from darkness is a division in time, which is why he sees "Day" as "light-time" and "night" as "dark-time." This is a reasonable enough assumption, on the face of it, but it should be noted that the text itself does not define "Day" as light-time, but rather applies "Day" as a sort of proper name of light. God names the light "Day," and the darkness "Night"--the things themselves, not the periods of time in which we generally experience them. Time is never mentioned. In fact, "Day" is not separated from "Night" until day four, when celestial bodies are created to separate them, and it is there that the concept of time is first mentioned explicitly.
2. This point is interesting because Jordan's reading becomes less consistent than mine. Jordan sees the use of the word "day" in Gen. 2:4 as essentially different than its use throughout the first chapter. I see the usage as essentially the same--when the "days" are seen as discrete creation-acts of God, then naturally whenever the creation process as a whole is considered as a single unit (a single "act"), it is described as a "day."
3. Once again, I do not see a problem with the days of God's working-week providing the basis for the days of our working-week. Of course God created in such a way as to provide a pattern for our labors. But notice that my understanding is more sacremental--our week is an earthly reflection of God's week; it is not exactly the same thing. It lifts us into his life by a ritual approximation of his actions, but his actions (and his "week") are greater than ours.
4. I agree with Jordan here. Don't see a problem.
5. I have one minor quibble, and then a more substantial disagreement. The sun was not "made to fit the pre-existent length of the day." The sun doesn't regulate the length of our days; the earth does. That's minor, but there is actually a major disagreement/difference of understanding at stake, in that I simply and fundamentally disagree with Jordan's belief that qualities like duration of time have some essential reality apart from the material (or spiritual) systems that they describe. To assert that they do smacks of rank Platonism to me. I see nothing in scripture that encourages such a view. It's bad philosophy and bad science.
6. I agree--Gap Theory is dumb.
7. I also see the Framework Hypothesis as fundamentally flawed, in that it renders the creation account non-historical. The book of Genesis is a history, and needs to be understood as such.

posted by Jeremy at 7:31 AM
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Saturday, July 22, 2006

Of the Trouble With Teilhard

What is one to make of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin? My understanding of his thought is still rather impressionistic (and some would claim that his own was as well), but what I do understand of it I find simultaneously fascinating, attractive (in certain respects), and off-putting (in others). Was he profound or profoundly in error? Was he a saint or a heretic? Or, perhaps, was he a little of all of these things?

Teilhard is easy to despise, if one is of a certain temperament. He wrote in a style that is at once heartfelt, ecstatic, heady, pretentious, and obtuse. He was an idealist's idealist, a mystic's mystic. He was also a modernist, while at the same time a critic of modernistic materialism. The Incarnation of Christ was the central concept of all his thinking, but (from what I understand), he understood this as occurring gradually over millennia through the evolution of mankind towards its Omega point (Christ, who becomes a sort of personalized telos rather than the Savior of mankind), rather than the intrusion of the divine Word at a particular time in history. It's like he had this profound understanding of all the implications of Incarnational and Trinitarian reality, while finding the historical events that reveal that reality incredible or irrelevant.

How does grace apply to such a man as Teilhard, who personally denied Original Sin, and thought that evolution, in some sense, "saved" God, but nevertheless always remained in humble submission and willful allegiance to the Church, recanting the public profession of those of his beliefs that Church authorities pronounced unacceptable, while privately continuing to explore them? Who fervently believed that Christ would be made "all in all" through the intrusion of God's life into the world by means of the Body of Christ, but didn't seem to find Christ as an historical personage terribly interesting? Who understood that humanity (and by extension, the cosmos) would only be saved in and through Christ, but denied a Fall from which creation must be redeemed?

How could one man have been so profoundly right in certain central aspects of his theology, while profoundly wrong in other, similarly central aspects? How could one man have displayed the fervent life of the Spirit, and the confusion of a spirit of error? As I try to perceive the Body as more fundamentallly organic than ideological, I would like to believe that when Teilhard finally encounters the Parousia he longed for so desperately, he will be greeted rather as Bree the talking Docetist horse was by Aslan in The Horse and His Boy:

"Now, Bree," he said, "you poor, proud, frightened Horse, draw near.
Nearer still, my son. Do not dare not to dare. Touch me. Smell
me. Here are my paws, here is my tail, these are my whiskers. I am a
true Beast."

"Aslan," said Bree in a shaken voice, "I'm afraid I must be rather a
fool."

"Happy the Horse who knows that while he is still young. Or the Human
either."

posted by Jeremy at 3:01 PM
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Thursday, July 20, 2006

Of a Prayer

O ALMIGHTY Father, thou King eternal, immortal, invisible, thou only wise God our Saviour; Hasten, we beseech thee, the coming upon earth of the kingdom of thy Son, our LORD and Saviour Jesus Christ, and draw the whole world of mankind into willing obedience to his blessed reign. Overcome all his enemies, and bring low every power that is exalted against him. Cast out all the evil things that cause wars and fightings among us, and let thy Spirit rule the hearts of men in righteousness and love. Repair the desolations of former days; rejoice the wilderness with beauty; and make glad the city with thy law. Establish every work that is founded on truth and equity, and fulfill all the good hopes and desires of thy people. Manifest thy will, Almighty Father, in the brotherhood of man, and bring in universal peace; through the victory of thy Son, Jesus Christ our LORD. Amen.

posted by Jeremy at 2:52 PM
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Monday, July 17, 2006

Of Clarification of My Previous Post, and Responses To Criticism

• Relativity tells us that there is no privileged (read "ultimate") description of duration or sequence of events in spacetime.

• All observer-participants in the physical world experience their own unique timeframe. This works rather like Narnian time--each observer's timeframe runs faster or slower relative to everybody else's depending on what that observer happens to be doing (and what everybody else happens to be doing). Now most everyone here on earth operates under pretty much the same relativistic conditions, so the differences between all our gazillions of different timeframes are so close to nil that we can disregard them under all but the most extraordinary circumstances, and speak generally of what we might call "Earth Time." But somebody in a different part of the universe (or in a different universe, if such things exist--many physicists are open to the idea, though I must say I am not fond of it) might be operating under conditions different enough from our own to make his experience of time significantly out-of-synch with ours. If there were a lot of folks there with him, operating under largely the same conditions, we might generalize their collective experience under another appellation--say, "Narnia Time." These two general timeframes, "Earth Time" and "Narnia Time," would be overwhelmingly stable and consistent internally--two humans on Earth would agree that, say, a glass fell from the table before it shattered on the floor, and that the whole thing took 1.063 seconds. But say that there was a magical door in Narnia through which a dwarf and a centaur could observe this same terrestrial event, but from their own Narnian timeframe. Our dwarf and centaur would agree with each other on their version of what happened, but they might describe the glass shattering gradually over a hundred years, after which it rose, miraculously restored, from floor to table. Furthermore, they might describe this second action as occurring almost instantaneously, though it was hard to tell, as the pageant of glass and table was obscured by the simultaneous intrusion of the Second Punic War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both the Earthly and Narnian descriptions of what happened to the glass would be fully correct and literal, from their own perspective. Neither description would be the "real" description--what happened to the glass does in fact depend to a certain degree on whom you ask. What General Relativity does is provide the scientific framework for reconciling these two descriptions.

What I am suggesting about the Genesis 1 creation account is akin to the phenomenon described above, though not entirely. I am saying that Genesis 1 recounts the story of the creation from a third, similar, but essentially different, viewpoint--let us call it "Aslan Time." Alsan perceives the falling glass from his kingdom in the Utter East, a world beyond all worlds, whose timeframe is the archetype from which both the Earthly and Narnian timeframes are derived. Likewise, it is increasingly common for theologians to reject the formerly common view of God as wholly atemporal (for reasons I cannot elaborate here), but rather to see our experience of time as a reflection or shadow of a divine temporality arising as an aspect of the interaction of the Persons of the Godhead. Time in the created order derives its characteristics from both the interrelations of material things and the whole creation's relation to its Creator. Divine temporality arises solely from the Trinity, and is different than, if analogous to, our experience of time.

I think the creation days of Genesis 1 are shaped by this divine temporality, for several reasons--the fact that the account begins before there are structures in the universe from which what we know as time can arise, the fact that the days are framed by unique creation-acts of God (i.e. Each creation-act is not portrayed as occurring "on" or "in" a certain day--rather, each act is a day, framed by a covering/covenanting/evening and a harvest/appraisal/morning), and the fact that God appears to create time on day four. Genesis 1 is a very literal, historical acount of how God created the world. However, so is the Big Bang Theory, with its approximately fifteen-billion-year-old cosmos. The two descriptions simply assume different reference points (and, of course, they tell their stories to different ends).

In response to Katy's other question, I would say that of course our week is patterned after God's creation week. I don't see a problem.

Josh, hopefully this clarification clears up that I am in fact taking Genesis 1 literally (depending on what you mean by "literally"--the term itself is pretty vague). Darwinian Evolution doesn't enter the picture here, so I'm not sure why you bring it up. The current proposal of an approximately fifteen-billion-year-old universe is based on things like redshift measurements and proportions of various elements in the observable universe, not estimations of how long it would take for life to evolve (assumed to be only a tiny sliver of the total age of the cosmos). As for the creation of light and its division from darkness, and their constitution as Day and Night, I think the emphasis is on something more cosmic--Day as "heat" and "life," and Night as a "bending" or "turning back" from Day (check your Strong's). I think the original readers would have interpreted the passage this way. Of course, they would have seen it as meaning what we ordinarily mean by "day" and "night" too--again, I don't see a problem with that. Perhaps a problem arises if you equate the "Day" and "Night" with the "evening" and "morning," which does seem to do violence to the text, given the inappropriate order ("Night" follows "Day," while "evening" precedes "morning") and vastly divergent symbolism. Notice that there are creation "days," but not creation "nights." This is because "Night," as Genesis 1 uses it, is a constituted form of the pre-creation darkness and chaos--it is anti-creational, an "aversion" to the "Creation-Day."

I hope I have shown that I am not "just" trying to accommodate science with this interpretation. To misappropriate a recent Leithartean distinction, I am not trying to let my scientific "tail" wag my theological "dog." Rather, I want to incorporate the whole experience of God given to man, through natural and special revelation, into my hermeneutics. Obviously natural revelation must not trump special revelation, but neither should the two disagree (else God would be a liar). The New Physics, comprising Special and General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, has turned out to reveal a universe that is overwhelmingly more Trinitarian in character than was imagined by Newtonian physics, and vastly more suggestive of a divinely-instituted order (an order than runs much deeper than we could have envisioned under older models). Thus I hardly see reason to shrink from its claims without careful consideration.

posted by Jeremy at 7:28 PM
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Saturday, July 01, 2006

Of Rethinking the Six Days of Genesis 1

posted by Jeremy at 4:55 PM
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