Daily Archives: 06/03/2012

There ain’t no allegories on the Euphrates

Posted on 06/03/2012 by Jon Garvey

Just a quick one. How often do you hear people saying that Genesis 2-3 should not be taken historically, but as an allegory of the human condition generally: “Everyman’s Fall”. Adam and Eve, and their fall, should be taken figuratively. These are the same people who remind one that history only really became a genre with the Greeks, that we’re reading an ANE text too literally, and so on. It suddenly occurs to me that nobody ever seems to ask whether there  actually was ever an ANE genre of theological allegory of the kind  on which they insist. I can’t find any trace of one in John H Walton’s review … Continue reading →

Posted in Adam, Creation, Science, Theology | 13 Comments

Jim Packer, fundamentalism and time warps

Posted on 06/03/2012 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just been re-reading Jim Packer’s Fundamentalism and the Word of God, partly from nostalgia as well as from a desire to see how the concept of fundamentalism might have changed since 1958. “Nostalgia” because the book was lent to me by an older Christian when I took over the leadership of my school Christian Union back in 1968. I didn’t read it for about five years, but it did at least leave me with the rare privilege of knowing what the word “fundamentalism” originally meant. And that is simply affirmation of the five “fundamentals” of historic Christianity identified in a series of documents in the USA early in the … Continue reading →

Posted in Science, Theology | 19 Comments