A lifeless galaxy?

 In a book launch speech, James Franklin uttered this memorable line:

"The explosion of a lifeless galaxy is just a firework, the death of a human is a tragedy".

Right on both counts, but wrong in coupling the two.

If the evolutionary view is right, then life came from the cosmos and is derivative of it. It has no inherent value because the cosmos has no inherent value. It contains no locus of value. It is axiologically neutral.

This morning at our ecclesium the prayer said words to effect: 'from the beginning of time, millions of years ago...' then went on to list the very forces at work which are the outcome of that very same materialist conception of the world.

He has bolted his Christian understanding onto the very world view that seeks to undo the Christian understanding.

It was a pulling-the-carpet-from-under-one's-own-feet moment.

Yet Genesis has it differently.

God is the father of live and he 'breathed' it into Adam whom he formed from the ground. Adam connected both, then, to the material world, and the life of God.

God, creating in the days of our experience shows our place in the hierarchy of dependency of creation, and before God as one 'like' him. God shows his active presence in that creation; working in the 'space' he has created by creating over the very days that constrain and govern the tempo of our experience of that domain. God with us indeed. God's action, like ours: in time the basis for fellowship.

12 essentail reads

 A friend crafted a list of books to give to a contact he'd made with a book store assistant. The assistant had not before encountered a Christian who could make his faith dynamic, inviting, and interesting. She wanted to know what to read.

The Bible of course: gospel of John. But also some books to help build the context (the 12th is my suggestion...only because I wanted 12 books; a good dozen, or maybe 13: a baker's dozen):

1. The Screwtape Letters: Lewis

2. The Great Divorce: Lewis

3. Schaeffer's Trilogy: Schaeffer -- Three books that set Western cultural history in a Biblical context: The God Who is There, Escape from Reason, He Is There and Is Not Silent.

4. Degenerate Moderns: Jones

5. The Devil's Delusion: Berlinski

6. Does God Exist?: Miethe/Flew

7. Darwin on Trial: Johnson

8. Sick Societies: Edgerton

9. In Defence of History: Evans

10. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Scruton

11. A Fatal Conjunction: Kimm

12. The End of History: Windschuttle

13. Destructive Generation: Collier and Horowitz

Our credal recitation today

 Congregational recitation of a creed is an important part of our collective worship. Also good, mind you, for private devotional contemplation. Maybe do it once a week, slowly think through a creed (maybe not the Athanasian; it's a little long).

Whether it's the Apostles or the Nicene, particularly, we are reminded of the basic structure of our faith's foundation. So commit both to memory!

Today we used an important passage in the New Testament instead of one of the early creeds.

There appear to be a number of credal passages in Paul particularly. We recited this one (Colossians 1:13-22):

He rescued us from the  domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of  His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For  by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him.

He  is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.

He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

Although [we] were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet He has now reconciled [us] in His fleshly body through death, in order to present [us] before him holy and blameless and beyond reproach.

What to we call our buildings?

We don't have a generic name for a church building.

Cathedral = the seat of a bishop (where his 'throne' is; rather pompous).

Minster = large building built as part of a monastery, doesn't apply.

Abbey = a type of monastery, so that's out.

Chapel = typically an adjunct facility as part of a large building, e.g. a cathedral, a large church assembly building such as a minster, a large home; adopted for a non-conformist meeting/assembly hall, sends wrong message, so, no.

Church = WRONG. This is a group of people.

Auditorium = close, but implies a one-way activity.

Meeting hall = too boring, but accurate, 'church meeting hall'? Too cumbersome

I've got it!

Eccleseum.= the assembly place of a church. Perfecto!

There we are: already a word in use:

https://www.spsnyc.org/sermon-library/sitting-together-intentionally-parashat-trumah-2021

Jung: wrong again!

Richard Noll, in his book "The Jung Cult" writes, quoting Hinkel: 

"...it is indeed a central part of Jung's repudiation of traditional Christianity that offered a God that was distant, transcendent, and absolute."

And how wrong this is.

The Bible tells of a God who is in intimate fellowship with his creatures, then after their repudiation of him, provides a means of regaining that communion.

The God who dwells with his people in their imageness, in propositional communication, in the Tabernacle and Temple, is among us in Christ, who upon leaving us provided the gift of his indwelling Spirit and the family of the faithful.

This is God who is close, who seeks man for fellowship...for man's good. Who has shown us his proximity and relatable connection by performing the creation within the basic delineation of our existence: in a series of days, cementing that relational connection first in the Sabbath then in the person of Christ Immanuel.

How to do missions.

The importance of creation in ground floor evangelism, from a missiologist at Fuller.

 

Panel | N. T. Wright, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, and Scott Sunquist - YouTube 

 

Wright's response, while very theologically helpful, is dead from the get go because he disparages the timing of creation. And the theology is good: even for a venue like Fuller!

 

I think these guys live in a split world. Wright for instance in his NT theology is about as non-Platonist as one can get, but in his anthropology and cosmology is as 'forked tongue' as a pagan with a Platonic context.

 

TE/LA-ers seem to have platonised the creation and placed it in some form of 'upper story', mysterious, inaccessible and defying description (and so unteachable). Yet, this is the God who speaks; who reveals himself to man who he made in his image for fellowship. It is contradictory and without scriptural foundation for them to overturn this in the most important relational passage in the Bible: Genesis 1 ( to 3:8). On their terms Wright obscures God's act of initiating fellowship, and hides it from we who are to be rulers of that  very creation as his image-bearers: thus his primary act of identity and his chief credential for worship is hidden and inaccessible. How can creation reflect his glory when he's not told us its glorious basis? Sounds like a shell game!

But Wright is wrong in his disparagement. It is essential that days are days because by them God engages his creation in its terms: makes an ontological grounding for fellowship by the terms he created to delineate our experience of his creation. This underscored by using the days that he made as basic to his engagement with his creature who will go on to reflect him; not in some ineffable mystical miasma, but in this real world of the days in which our God created and robustly ground our relationship with him.

The direct coupling of event with word in the days plays an important role in showing also the God is the Lord of these days and of the creation, completely government the creation with his direct action and evaluation that underwrites his pleasure in the result. There is thus no room for pagan fantasies, unstated intermediaries (Hebrews 11:3 has a role here too). This also makes the Sabbath of the Covenant also pregnant with the glory of his creation and love of his creature.

 

Wright dashes all this into a Platonic bowl of pottage with his denial of the basic organizing tempo and connection of creation to our world.

A theological pivot

Most Christian discourse related to Genesis 1-3, particularly by those who want to read it as a piece of direct text (i.e., taking the days as they are calibrated), spend far too much time on the content...which we can all read, and too little on the theology.

Ken Ham, for instance, never seems to really get to the theological implications of the 6 days of creation.

They are the orientating basis for our understanding of God, the creation and ourselves in the creation and in relation to God. God shows that he is not distant but near to us, executing the creation in the days he made for our fellowship with him (and this flows onto the grandeur of the Sabbath in the Covenant with Israel); he also shows that his word is the immediate cause of the creation. This demonstrates direct connection with the creation and gives force to the 'good's, and the final 'very good', further reinforcing God's intimate connection with the creation which culminates in Genesis 3:8 with God actively in the garden seeking Adam and Eve in fellowship. This is utterly different from any pagan myth.

The days, being 'our terms' are clearly located in real history, our history. But they do more: they underscore that they are in the concrete reality of the world we are in, (contrary to monist dreams), they form the intellectual basis for or understanding of reality (contrary to materialist dreams), and show it's goodness for our habitation and care (contrary to pagan spiritualism, platonic mind games, and Gnostic deceit).

The immediacy of creation also side-lines any notion of secondary or intermediate causes, either of which push God away from his creation and denigrate it's spiritual (godly) significance as the place of fellowship and where man reflects God's image and of us. Psalm 8 celebrates this intimacy that results.