Is Hugh Ross for real?

A comment I made that sprang from a reference on a video to Hugh Ross.

Ross's view seems to introduce depersonalising Aristotelianism into the the Creation account. The account is centrally about who God is (to adapt the title of Goffman's book, it is The Presentation of Himself in Everyday Life) and the creation of the place in which we both reflect him in his creation-for-us, and live in fellowship with him (c.f. Genesis 3:8a). It is not a remote or abstract topic that has in its detail no connection with its purpose, but a concrete set of intentional events engaging this concrete reality.

 

Unless the creation account is read in terms of the relational objective, it becomes detached from God, or detaches the living God from his creation through either extended time periods (congruent with the pagan 'mystery' view of creation), or processes that he cannot truly communicate to us and are disjunctively interposed between his word and its effect for the objective of relationship. But we know that the only intermediary is, of course Christ: John 1:3, 10; Colossians 1:16; Hebrews 1:2, 11:3.

 

The whole account, showing a cadence of days and a cyclical sequence of word to result to evaluation in each day, place God as the real agent really in the created domain: the real person, doing the creation and directly active in that indicated by (analogically) doing by his 'hand' or 'fingers' (Psalm 8: 3, 6).

 

He is not in it exhaustively, of course, as he is before and beyond the creation, separate from it and not 'captured' by it. He is truly in the creation which, pre-fall, represents 'heaven and earth' come together, to use N. T. Wrights marvelous phrase. It is thus about the real communion of real persons. God as prime, we as his image in personhood.

 

This is underlined by the effort the Spirit goes to to drive the point of 'days' being the type of days we experience and in which we experience fellowship with God. God's work in the very temporal domain that we are constrained by shows the start of fellowship and the true 'realness' of the creation, while he being separate from it. He works in our world within the tempo and existential framing of that world to which we are subject. He underlines the creation as the stage for fellowship of creature and creator. He is 'here with us' from the start of creation.

 

Thus the days are 'calibrated' as 'evening and morning' type days. Diurnal lighting variations have nothing to do with it. The declaration of the type of days is to set out that they are not 'long periods'. They are calibrated and given ordinal arrangement to make that clear. They show an intimacy and immediacy in creation that belies pagan fantasies that purposely either capture god within the cosmos and thus degrading him, or drive him so far away as to be meaningless as does deism.

 

The 'days' show God's warm proximity to his creatures. Fussing about with the various uses of 'yom' in the Bible fails to grasp the theology of Genesis 1, and is simply lexically irrelevant. Indeed the importance of the 'day' is amplified in Exodus 20:8 and 30:12 as the covenantal acme of worship. The latter in God's direct speech...notably immediately after the passage about the skilled craftsmen.

 

In the end the creation account obstructs every pagan/materialist move to sunder God from creature, remove him from our 'life-world' and their ambition to detach us from the truth of what and who is truly real and who and what we are. It also destroys any opening for 'chance' to operate: Proverbs 3: 19, 20 and of course Hebrews 11:3.

 

BTW, 'light' before the sun is also a meaningless quibble. As Francis Schaeffer points out in Genesis in Space and Time, 'light' is a simulacrum of the whole electro-magnetic spectrum, and perhaps the entire energy field, without which there is no matter at all. For an ancient document this shows a stunning understanding of physics. [Naturally I disagree with FS on his floccinaucinihilipilification of the 'days']