Astronomy and the Bible

In his video Heiser seeks to lampoon the Genesis account.

My response:

"the sun created after days...how does that work?"

Here's how it works. 'Day' is a unit of time; it is the unit of time that circumscribes our experience of life within the creation. As a unit of time, it needs to be calibrated. Thus, what type of 'day' is this? Here's the calibration that tells us what type of day: it's an 'evening and morning' type of day. This makes it the type of day that we know, experience and live within. A unit of time passes without any marker necessary (so we don't need to wear a watch to know that our lunch hour will pass in one hour); indeed that's why the markers of time could be created after the unit was communicatively established to tell us that God created in the history that we experience. 

The creation week was not merely contiguous with our history, but it was continuous with it. God shows that the creation is not a pagan myth off in fantasy land, and God is not the pagan nonsense god (compare the trash-talk in Enuma elish), he is the one active, present and personal in the historical domain that we are in. The 'days' serve to place the creation in the continuity of the reality that defines our life-world. God is thus the God near, present, and with us (Genesis 3:8 illuminates this), setting the stage for the theophanies throughout the Bible and culminating in the Incarnation!

Thus we don't need the speculation of some who imagine a 'temporary' light source to produce the diurnal lighting variation of the the day, all we need is the names of times in the day to denote the type of day. The irrelevance of lighting variations is evident if one has traveled in the arctic circle in summer. At 11pm one knows it is late evening and time to sleep, even though there is sufficient light to read a book by. 

A related issue often used to misunderstand the Creation is the creation of light before the sun. Francis Schaeffer deals with this quite adroitly in Genesis in Space and Time  (although he fluffs on the historical significance of the 'days', inadvertently de-historicising the whole creation) in pointing out that the creation of light indicates, must indicate, the creation of the entire energy field that is basic to the physical cosmos. 'Light' had to be created first for the rest to follow, something the ancients could not have known. Without its energy substrate, the sun would have been a mass of inert de-energized 'stuff' (the dark?).

Denomination-styled prayers

Each denomination has its own prayer styles.

For instance, from a thousand miles one could identify this prayer as Anglican:

Lord God,
we have sinned against you;
we have done evil in your sight.
We are sorry and repent.
Have mercy on us according to your love.
Wash away our wrongdoing and cleanse us from our sin.
Renew a right spirit within us
and restore us to the joy of your salvation,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Baptists do it differently, thus:

Lord God,
we have just; sinned against you;
we just have done evil in your sight.
We are just sorry and we just repent.
Just have mercy on us according to your love.
Wash away our wrongdoing and just cleanse us from our sin.
Just renew a right spirit within us
and just restore us to the joy of your salvation,
in your name, amen. 

The primary liturgical word in some Baptist circles is...'just' and no one knows why.

No one knows why prayers are ended with 'in your name'. Perhaps a misunderstanding of what it is to pray in Jesus name...one can only guess!

Get to 'amazing'

Letter to my minister:

When you talked about the basic element of the Bible, I thought of the Shema: almost right, but I liked your reliance on Genesis 1:1. The basic teaching here is that 'base' reality is personal; or rather personhood is basic to and the source of reality, explicated in the subsequent verses. We live in a thoroughly materialistic intellectual environment with inevitable overlays of post-modernity (the great reaction to a materialist conception). Contemporary neo-paganistic 'self-ism' is the response to its futility.

Your words about communicating our faith reminded me of being urged as a young Christian in the late 60s to 'tell my friends about Christ'. without any guidance whatsoever. Most attempts ended in a shambles as I had no way of connecting my 'church world' to their everyday world.

I think a Christian needs to be able to cogently answer three questions and have three answers; an arresting 'elevator pitch', a longer 'coffee shop' response, and a fulsome conversation maker.

The three questions are:

1. Why do you go to church/what's church about/what's in it for you?
2. Why do you read the Bible?
3. Why are you a Christian?

There are three types of answer:

1. the objective
2. the 'what's in it for me' and
3. the teleological

But all answers should be able to lead to:

• the reliability of the Biblical text and its content,
• that it truly speaks about the reality of human life and experience/the dilemma of evil and its frustrations, and
• that it is true.

The end game is to get to two crucial matters: why we have excellent grounds to believe God is, and excellent grounds to accept that the resurrection occurred and Jesus is who he said he was.

I was, when I was baptised, urged to 'bring people to Christ'. Pretty hard for a 12 year old to comprehend, but what we need to do is equip people to have conversations about faith that 'put a pebble in the shoe' of our listener. Not a log in their path, or a cliff ahead, but a grain of challenge to their worldview. If every Christian in Oz could do this....amazing!

Is church really 'safe'?

I was recently looking at the variety among Christian denominations in respect of the Child Safe Standards, recently brought into legislation in NSW.

There seems to be a remarkable lack of both imagination and insight in the name of the various approaches. They seem to be themed around the double bind of 'safe church/ministry'.

A double bind typically creates an internally contradictory message: a sort of gas-lighting. Thus, 'Safe Church' sends the message that church is not safe. Just like Roz Ward and her Marxist colleagues sought to make out that schools would not be safe without her insidious indoctrination of children in destructive immorality.

Unfortunately we live in the shadow of Gillard's vindictively mounted Royal Commission which failed to discover the obvious: child abuse arose because the law was either indifferently enforced, or, in Victoria, ignored while abusers were sheltered by police. Fundamentally it was a problem due to Government failure.

But, as Saul Alinsky would remind: never let a good crisis go to waste (for the Marxist cause).

Church is safe, it's the vehicle of ultimate safety in this corrupt and fallen world. Not that we shouldn't bring good and godly order to ministry and be as sharp as eagles in protecting the vulnerable. After all, we've all read Jeremiah 17:9. But the Child Safe Standards are a good idea; at last the Authorities do their job.

Surely we can come up with a term for this that reflects a Christian ethos though, rather than ape the Marxist scare tactic. 'Ministry Care', 'Good Order', to reflect Paul in 1 Cor 14:40, even simple 'Ministry Standards', seems fine to me. They don't carry the can for Gillard's project and avoid the paradoxical insult of 'Safe Ministry', like we've agreed to reform our wicked ways.

 

I currently work within a denomination that provides training in line with the Child Safe Standards, its called 'Creating Safe Spaces'; a double bind, as thought the spaces we use for ministry would otherwise be unsafe. Safe Ministry is used by another denomination.

 

Here are some alternative names for such training. Free to use!

 

Ministry Prep(aration)

 

Good Order Work/Ministry

 

Baseline (or Ministry Baseline)

 

Performing Ministry/Ministry Performance (Skills)

 

Ministry Place-making

Ministry Conduct

Ministry Skills and Awareness

Ministry Participant (Awareness/Skills) (Certificate)

Paganism swallows the church

One of the quaint ceremonies of government, the ABC, of course, business and some community groups is to intone an 'acknowledgement of country' without a trace of mock seriousness before every meeting, scratch of chin, burp and cough.

No, the last bit is satire.

Churches? Some too, I've mentioned elsewhere.

My objection boils down to two aspects of church life tracked in the Bible and illustrated just to make sure we understand.

1. Galatians 3:28

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

2 Corinthians 6:14

Do not be mismatched with unbelievers; for what do righteousness and lawlessness share together, or what does light have in common with darkness?

The 'acknowledgement' apart from being anachronistic splits the church, makes two different classes of Christians; seeks to partition off parts of the body of  Christ from others. Given its reference to the historic animism of Aboriginal Australians it also brings this paganism into the very heart of the church: where we meet together and the Spirit is present, we defer, usually at the very start of our meetings, to the land 'totem' that possesses its inhabitants. WRONG.

I've got to ask, did Paul suggest that the Ephesians acknowledge they are in Diana's city and say 'hi' to the priests of Diana, giving that demon precedence over the gathering of Christ's church?

Did the priests when they entered the promised land first of all acknowledge the demon Baal and its priests? Did they acknowledge the priests of Moloch?

No. Here's what God thought of Baal: 1 Kings 18:25ff

Conflict of visions

1. Comment in reply to another comment on Warner Wallace's video on the Old Testament's touches of knowledge about the cosmos.

The putative conflict between science and 'faith' is not about the ordinary facts, hypotheses or ever-changing theories of science. It is rather, about the modern underlying dogma of materialism that dominates the philosophical attitude of most modern scientists and indeed, ordinary people.

This is the conflict: has God spoken the cosmos into existence, or is is merely an unexplained 'given' that means nothing. At root the conflict is of worldviews. The worldview of metaphysical materialism (which undoes itself oxymoronically) on the one hand that tells us that nothing means anything (no one lives that way, by the way) and on the other hand the worldview of the Bible is that everything means something because it is the creation of the loving God.

2. The video opens with comparison of Genesis 1 and modern neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis. This comment also appears:

Some valuable material here. I would object to the idea that the creation order in Genesis 1 contains science, though. What it contains is a report of factual events. The only 'science' pretended is evolutionary dogma, and that is not science, it is a rehash of ancient mythology. In itself it is a non-credible attempt to say that life made itself by accident; that the vastly complex information system and its material carrier producing interlocking chemical processes 'just happened'. An assertion that has no basis in observation.

The risk of reading verses of the Bible

Some people seem to think that the Bible is a collection of verses. That is, of isolated sayings collected together.

No. The verses serve the purpose that numbering lines does in a legal brief. The system of verses and chapters is such that it preserves reference points across different formats of the text.

The Bible's books are generally just that, books. Usually of narrative (leaving aside the Proverbs and Psalms).

Thus we don't read 'verses' we read passages. Paragraphs or groups of paragraphs are the usual narrative units. Reading 'verses' will get you mislead.

Alongside misunderstanding the ancient world it leads to a few problems.

I read in The Daily Chrenk two typical such problems.

He talked about the horror of  'an eye for an eye' type of punishment for crime, and the equal horror of visiting the sins of a father down two generations.

What he missed was 'an eye for an eye' is a command for proportionate punishment. Punishment that fits the crime. So don't punish a poke in the eye with demolition of the perp's house, or incineration of his harvest, for example.

The three generations of inherited sin is contrasted with the 1000 generations of good. This is teaching that under God's covenant 'sin' dies out quickly, or its ramifications are dissipated across very few generations, whereas the good has an extraordinary enduring benefit to the descendants.

You can read more here: Leviticus 24:17-23 and Exodus 34:7.

The next one is about Noah's ark. Genesis 7:4. Noah and his troop had to sit in the ark for 7 days doing nothing until the flood came?

Nope. 7 days of frantic activity, storing and cataloging food and other stock, planning and trialing feeding and waste disposal systems, practicing ark management routines.

This was a static 'working up' period with the luxury of a stable platform. It's similar to the start of a long ocean yacht race. For a couple of days before hand the crew is on board 'working up' the yacht, their patterns of work and rig changes. Very busy periods in both cases.