“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.

Last week, on national TV, John said that Genesis 1 was poetry, not literal history, and that Christians who believed otherwise simply needed some education. It boils down to many Christians not being aware of Ancient Near Eastern cultures, and how they would have understood this passage. But every atheist knows that compromise on this issue is like the iceberg under the water, slowly ripping its way along the entire side of the Titanic. If evolution is true, Christianity is simply a human ideology (like a creation story), which may be helpful, but sits within a framework of “reality” as defined by modern scientism. In other words, the Christian is on the atheist’s turf. If Genesis 1 is literal history, then the atheist not only sits within a Christian reality, a turf that the saints will inherit from him, but does so under a very bright and interrogative light, the light of not only physical but social and liturgical Law–God’s grid.

John represents the Centre for Public Christianity, which was founded to put Christianity back into the secular arena to which it gave existence but which has been stolen from it. If you are interested in the Ancient Near Eastern theory, the centre’s site has some introductory videos by John Walton here, and you can read a rebuttal here. I would add to the rebuttal by saying that neither Dickson nor Walton seem to have considered that the biblical text can be scientific (observational), liturgical, architectural, historical (a true chronology) and poetic all at the same time. They are victims of modernity who either have not been instructed in how to actually read ancient texts (including observation of repeated patterns) or else have little respect for these ancient texts which they implore us to understand. Genesis 1 contains all of these facets because all of them are expressions of the nature of God, and of man.

Well, enough on that, and back to the slippery slope. Unless one is walking on ice or a wet floor, one does not expect to slip. It happens very suddenly and generally before one really knows what is going on. The first experience is generally an awareness of pain. The Katoomba Christian Convention invited John Dickson to speak at its next Women’s Convention. Because John has recently published a thoughtful book stating that he believes women should be able to preach sometimes, and this has caused some controversy, John has been disinvited. I’m not questioning anybody’s motives here, and I’m not putting it down to politics. John is sincere and the convention made a wise move (you can read their statement here). My whole point here is to say that 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.

The Creation Science people have been telling us for years that the liberal church’s inability to stand against gay clergy is a direct result of their mythologizing of Genesis 1, 2 and 3. If we evolved from non-life, the difference between the sexes is not a combination of physiological, social and liturgical. Social and liturgical stations become a free-for-all. Whatever I feel like is what God has called me to do. (It’s funny how we disbelieve serial killers in movies when they say that God told them to do it, yet when a woman says she wants to be a bishop because God told her to do it, entirely against His written Word, people take her at her word.) John’s new compromise is only slight, but as with the justification of same sex marriage, it has to deconstruct or ignore all the defenses against slipping further—basically, reject the biblical worldview.

Lionel Windsor has a measured response to Dickson’s book here, in which he points out that Dickson has to argue that “teaching ain’t teaching.” That is a Genesis 2 issue. God gave Adam the Law, and he was to digest it and teach his bride and protect her. This process is repeated thousands of times throughout the Bible (although these Anglican gents don’t often operate with that particular biblical lens). In these events, when the serpent is crushed, the Bride sings a song of victory and joins her Bridegroom in calling down the curses upon the evil one. [1] So, there is most definitely a time for the Bride to speak, but ignorance of biblical types and the repeated Covenantal process which they communicate will leave us open to another hidden process: the slippery slope.

I would argue that the necessity to redefine “teaching” is very similar to the bait-and-switch carried out by one of Dickson’s fellow panelists last week on Q&A, Professor Lawrence Krauss, who tried to tell us that “nothing ain’t nothing,” because he has a Genesis 1 problem. (An audience member then questioned him, “If nothing isn’t nothing, where did the nothing come from?”) Dickson bases most of his argument concerning teaching on the interpretation of a single Greek word because he does not have an interpretive grid, at least, not a biblical one. John’s rejection of the very ordered and worshipful physical creation of the world, and the animal and human life within it, for a chaotic process of sex and death (which, as my friend Tim Nichols says, is simply Enuma Elish baptized in post-Enlightenment balloon juice), leaves him without the interpretive grid within which all his favourite New Testament passages were written. It also leaves him with a God who expressed His perfect character and glory by initiating a mind-blowingly long process of suffering and death.

If John is keen to interpret the texts of the Bible with an understanding of the culture, his understanding must include the cultus, which had no problem with texts being poetic, historical, scientific and liturgical all at once. Such dissection of the text is a symptom of a similar dissection of reality, both physical and social. His questioning of the liturgical stations of men and women is the direct result of separating reality, and the rest of the Bible, from the liturgy of the historical Creation. [2 - PLEASE, PLEASE read these two essays.]

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[1] See how this pattern in Genesis plays out in Esther and the Ten Words, Trinitarian Judgments and The Throne of Eve.
[2] See Liturgical Man, Liturgical Woman.

ADDENDUM:

John Dickson has told me off for not actually reading his book. Fair enough. I’m working through it but so far Lionel’s detailed summary was spot on. And I don’t think John gets where I’m coming from.

The post was written for regular readers who are familiar with the work of James Jordan and Peter Leithart on Bible chronology, liturgy, Bible history (including a very different view on oral culture and transmission, and dating of NT texts to John’s view), and Bible structure (systematic typology).

I’m not questioning anybody’s motives. I’m saying that those who are attempting to read texts through an ancient lens are actually reading it through a very modern one, one that has little idea of the triune historical/social/liturgical structure of the Bible. Does anyone reading here see Genesis 1 in Israel’s annual festal calendar? Or in Leviticus 1 (the ascension offering)? Or in the structure of the Book of Revelation? And most importantly in the structure of worship services for the past 1900 years? If not, you won’t understand where I’m coming from. These structural similarities are not optional ornamentation. A structural allusion is very often the label on the tin. If we don’t get them under our belts, we haven’t a hope of answering the question John is asking (for example) without making a mess and capitulating to the anti-Christian culture around us. The Western church is already effeminate. To give women a greater speaking role without reference to revealed liturgy and liturgy-shaped history is going to make things worse.

So, where do we put prophetesses in the worship service? The testimony of women is part of a legal process which recapitulates Genesis 1, and in fact structures everything that God does, including His Covenant documents. The speaking roles of women are tied up with, and expressions of, the very nature of God, the relationships within the Trinity. (John makes a brief reference to Genesis in his book but so far there is no analysis of process or structure.) That was my point. I’ve been trying to promote such an understanding for a few years now but the modern mind — especially an educated one — is very often incapable of thinking in this way. Consequently, a lot of what is going on in the texts goes right over our heads. If you are interested to read more around here, my pointed criticism might seem a little less outrageous.

Over the last decade, a new area of research has confirmed that the writers of the Gospels did indeed have the kind of intimate and detailed knowledge of life in that time and place. And this new research comes from an in-depth study of personal names.In 2002 an Israeli scholar by the name of Tal Ilan did some seemingly boring work that has yielded some important dividends for New Testament authentication. She sorted through documents, engravings, scraps of papyrus, ossuaries and the like from the time period surrounding Jesus and the apostles in order to make a list of over 3,000 personal names — along with whatever bits of information she could find about those names. It was as if she were compiling a phone book from ancient trash heaps.

Because of her work, it became possible for the first time to find out what personal names were the most popular during the time of Jesus and how those names were used. Why is this important? Well, if the Gospel writers really had no solid contact with the characters in the stories, if they were writing decades later and had never visited the lands about which they were writing, getting the names right would be unlikely to the point of impossible. It would be as if a person who had never set foot out of California were attempting to write a story about people living in Portugal 60 years ago and the writer perfectly captured all the details of the personal names of the day without traveling, without the Internet, without encyclopedias or libraries. Clearly, guesses and intuitions about Portuguese names from over a half-century earlier are exceedingly unlikely to match the real situation on the ground.

But this new research shows that the Gospel writers were “spot on” in regard to the popularity, frequency, proportion and usage of personal names in the text of Scripture, indicating very deep familiarity with life in the exact area and timeframe of Jesus and his earliest followers…

“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:

There is a little-known irony in the controversy between creationists and evolutionists about the age of the world. The majority of scientists— the evolutionists—rely on a minority of the relevant data. Yet a minority of scientists—the creationists—use the majority of the relevant data. Adding to the irony is the public’s wrong impression that it is the other way around. Therefore, many ask: “If the evidence is so strongly for a young earth, why do most scientists believe otherwise?” The answer is simple: Most scientists believe the earth is old because they believe most other scientists believe the earth is old!

They trust in what’s called ‘circular reasoning’, not data. I once encountered such a clear example of this misplaced trust, that I made detailed notes immediately. It happened when I spoke with a young (in his early thirties, career-ambitious, and upwardly mobile) geochemist at Sandia National Laboratories, where I then worked as a physicist. I presented him with one piece of evidence for a young world, the rapid accumulation of sodium in the ocean. It was ideal, since much of geochemistry deals with chemicals in the ocean.

I wanted to see how he explained possible ways for sodium to get out of the sea fast enough to balance the rapid input of sodium to the sea. Creationist geologist Steve Austin and I wanted the information in order to complete a scientific paper on the topic.3 We went around and around the issue for an hour, but he finally admitted he knew of no way to remove sodium from the sea fast enough. That would mean the sea could not be billions of years old. Realizing that, he said, “Since we know from other sciences that the ocean is billions of years old, such a removal process must exist.”

I questioned whether we ‘know’ that at all and started to mention some of the other evidence for a young world. He interrupted me, agreeing that he probably didn’t know even one percent of such data, since the science journals he depended on had not pointed it out as being important. But he did not want to examine the evidence for himself, because, he said, “People I trust don’t accept creation!”

So, in reality, who are the free-thinkers now? Not the old earthers.

Read the full article here.

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.

Poetry

There’s plenty of poetry in the Bible. But Genesis chapters 1-3, or even 1-11, are not poetry. Yes, they are carefully structured and often chiastic (symmetric), but they do not possess the forms of Hebrew poetry.1 Classing them as such is an excuse to relegate them to the realm of ideology instead of history. Yes, the Hebrews were “event orientated” in their literature, but the jury is still out on whether this was actually an oral tradition. Maintaining that Adam couldn’t write (or that Christ’s disciples didn’t write a gospel immediately, a la Dr. John Dickson) is a view based on pop-history, not the Bible.2

Polemic

“A polemic is part of the prophet’s speech, but not the speech of a king. Not to imply it is ‘beneath’ the king, but it seems to be a rhetorical crowbar to pry open ears.”3

The prophets were the Lord’s lawyers, bringing a covenant lawsuit to covenant breakers. This is not technically polemic. Or, it was as polemic as a sheriff turning up on your doorstep to serve papers.

It seems that certain passages of the Bible are classed as ‘polemic’ because we have problems with the actual history, at least, the parts that embarrass us because they ride against pop-history.

The same goes for early Genesis. None of Genesis is polemic for the benefit of Moses’ people. It is not addressed to them, and shows no signs of being an attack on ancient gods or a modification of Ancient Near East suzerainty covenants. Genesis is very clearly the original. The problem is our unbelief.

Neither is Revelation a polemic against Rome, despite what Richard Bauckham says.4 It concerns the Old Covenant people and their compromise with Rome. They were Covenant-breakers, and the Covenant structure is laced throughout the Revelation like brandy in a Christmas pudding (Get a review copy of my book Totus Christus to see this in action).

The only real polemic in the Bible might be the speeches of Job’s accusers, as they stitch their case together to scapegoat him. And they were the bad guys, the snakes in Job’s wilderness.

Apocalyptic

This one applies mainly to Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation. The parts of these prophecies that don’t fit our interpretation of history get relegated to ideology, akin to the Jewish fables of the intertestament era. They lose their grip on actual history.

Sometimes this is understandable. Those who rightly refused to see Ezekiel 38-39′s Gog and Magog as a future battle still found it hard to pin it on something historical (including David Chilton). Jordan figured out that it was fulfilled in the book of Esther, and the Covenant “Egypt to Canaan” structure of Ezekiel confirms this (among many other more minor proofs). The prophecies of Isaiah concern the Restoration Covenant era, but this was an expansion of Israel’s spiritual influence. Because history doesn’t record a physical Jewish empire, the oracles are misunderstood and applied to the first century directly, or to some future Israel (applying oracles that concerned the Restoration of ancient Israel to modern Jews who are actually outside the Covenant!).

The apocalyptic sections of the New Testament suffer that same fate. Dispensationalists don’t understand that these concern a major change in the spiritual realm that was played out upon the first century Jews and the Roman empire, but the confusing imagery used is all firmly rooted in the Bible’s Covenant structure. It speaks a language we don’t understand.

So, these passages may be classed as apocalyptic, but unlike the Archibishop of Canterbury, we cannot conclude that John did see Jesus but it made him insane, and Revelation was the result!5 Nor can we cop out and say Matthew 24 jumped to the end of time, or that Revelation is just a general picture book of the church in the world. These prophecies commanded a moral response from their first audiences. All was to happen soon, upon this generation. Anything after that is just application, however helpful and important this may be. The prophecies are rooted firmly in history (a point which Bauckham makes, despite his misunderstanding of the purpose of the Revelation).

Apocalyptic is by definition a revelation of near historical events. It is not ideology from the subconscious of man for the purpose of rallying the troops or defining cultural identity.

None of these genres are an excuse for gnosticism, which, according to Jordan’s definition is this:

“Throughout history, the Christian Church has had to guard against the heresy of gnosticism. Gnosticism is not an ordinary heresy, because it does not manifest itself as a set of defined beliefs. Rather, gnosticism is a tendency: the tendency to replace the historic facts of Christianity with philosophical ideas. Gnosticism is the tendency to de-historicise and de-physicalise the Christian religion. Gnosticism transforms history into ideology and facts into philosophy. Gnosticism tends to see religion as man’s reflections about God and reality instead of as God’s revelation of Himself and His Word to man. As a tendency, gnosticism has always plagued the Church, and it is alive and well today, openly in ‘liberalism’, and in a more concealed fashion in ‘evangelicalism’.”6

So why is the Bible written the way it is? Peter Leithart writes:

As much as pragmatic Americans might wish it to be otherwise, the Bible is not an answer-book.  It includes advice, and laws, and rules, but a lot of it consists of puzzling prophecy, ancient history, obscure parables and apparently abstract theology.  What are we supposed to get from that?  We ask for an answer key, and God gives us poetry. Can’t we just skip the story and get to the moral?

No we can’t.

God gave us the Bible to guide us, but also – more fundamentally – to form us. By studying the Bible, hearing it, reading it, learning from it, we are being remade.7

So, it is we who are being recategorised, reformed according the Covenant. But we fight against it, and use literary genres to mask our unbelief and make the Bible palatable to an unbelieving world.

I guess this article is a polemic against gnosticism.

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1. “Given the ratio of verbal forms, the statistical evidence for the text [of Genesis] being prose is overwhelming.” See Francis Humphrey, “The meaning of yôm in Genesis 1:1–2:4”, Journal of Creation 21(2):52–55, August 2007. Article online at www.creation.com
2. See James B. Jordan, Toward a Chiastic Understanding of the Gospel According to Matthew, Part 1, Biblical Horizons Newsletter No. 94. “Matthew is the first of the gospels; there can be little doubt of this. The notion that Mark was first because Mark is shorter is nonsensical. Matthew was one of the disciples and was a man of letters. Who better to take notes during Jesus’ lifetime? Moreover, immediately after Pentecost there would have been a demand for a book containing the teaching and works of Jesus. The Jews were a people of the book. Each time God did a great work, a new part of Scripture was written to tell about it. The 3000 converts on the day of Pentecost would have expected such a book, and we can be pretty sure that Matthew set right down to write it. Doubtless he spoke with the other disciples, and perhaps Matthew’s gospel is to some extent a joint work. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that within a month after Pentecost copies of Matthew’s gospel were in circulation.”
3. Sorry, can’t remember where I found this quote.
4. Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation.  The use of “commercial imagery” to describe worship that is used in Revelation begins in Genesis 2 and appears many times throughout the Old Testament. See Worship as Commerce. If you want a handle on that, get into James Jordan’s lectures.
5. “The rantings of John the Divine about his theological rivals are part of the by-product of the very vision of the Living One that shows these ravings for what they are, by showing the radical and unconfined purpose of God in Jesus Christ” … ” we aren’t called to believe and endorse all they say, only to ask ourselves what we are taught here about the strangeness and sometimes the terror of the Word of God to fragile minds.“  Rowan Williams, Open To Judgment, p. 115-116. (Thanks to David Field for this).
6. James B. Jordan, Creation in Six Days, A Defense of the Traditional Reading of Genesis One, Chapter 4: Gnosticism Versus History.
7. Peter J. Leithart, Exhortation, Second Sunday of Trinity.