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Category Archives: Theology
When you have eliminated the impossible…
…whatever remains, however improbable, must be an unmanageable number of possibilities. I relaxed over an episode of Sherlock Holmes on the TV yesterday evening. Not that recent BBC pastiche, but the Jeremy Brett series, which for me is the definitive Holmes. I found, like most of them, that I’d seen it before, but the production and acting are so good it didn’t really matter. Sherlock Holmes is a classical creation, and so in one sense above criticism – it is what it is (as Paul McCartney said when someone was critiquing the double album: “Hey, it’s the Beatles White Album…”). But looked at dispassionately, the character actually embodies a popularisation … Continue reading
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
5 Comments
Easter changed everything
Didn’t it?
Posted in Creation, Medicine, Music, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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BioLogos and design – disagreement, incommunication or evasiveness?
The two BioLogos threads I mentioned here attracted some attention at Uncommon Descent. There seemed some consensus amongst even those who disagree on detail that Darrel Falk and other BioLogos people are somewhat less than forthcoming on just how they relate God’s creative input to outcomes in the “natural” order.
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
11 Comments
Torah – as sure as gravity
Christians nowadays don’t like “law” much, and I think it has less to do with interpreting Paul’s ideas on law and grace than our general societal attitudes. I’ve been in private e-mail correspondence about the differences between Eastern and Western Christianity, one of which is said to be a historic tendency of the Latin church to look at biblical terms forensically, which the Greeks don’t. Meanwhile, over on BioLogos frequent and indefatigable contributor Roger Sawtelle, in his characteristically generalising way, says that a defining characteristic of our “Fundamentalist brethren” is their legalism, whereas Christ does away with law: a rather inaccurate oversimplification it seems to me, but showing a prevalent … Continue reading
Posted in Theology
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Miracles and the ordinary wonders of the Universe
Penman has replied to my last post on Simon Conway Morris’s positive take on Biblical miracles. I think a post-length reply might be more helpful, not least because it gives me the opportunity to move away from Morris the individual. I mainly wanted in that post to show that childhood reading was what started him “ticking” – I’d not want to be responsible for a discussion about him behind his back that made him sick, rather than tick…
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
9 Comments
What makes Simon Conway Morris tick
I’ve just received my copy of the Cambridge University alumni magazine Cam. I graduated nearly 40 years ago, but have only been receiving this journal for a couple of years. No doubt it’s angled at those of us with sufficient age and resources to make bequests in favour of our alma mater. Be that as it may it has an interesting article about Simon Conway Morris which, as one would expect from him, is mainly about evolutionary convergence.
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
18 Comments
The non-evolution of conscience
I’ve been thinking about Romans again, in the context of Christian attempts to map questions about Adam and original sin to evolutionary theory. I made some preliminary points here, but I want to consider one particular aspect today – the nature of sin in the Bible generally, and in Romans particularly.
Posted in Creation, Science, Theology
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There ain’t no allegories on the Euphrates
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
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Jim Packer, fundamentalism and time warps
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
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Evidence for our loss of cosmic consciousness
There have been a few scattered discussions on BioLogos recently about the question of the “obsolete” cosmology in the Bible, and especially in Genesis 1, and I’ve done a recent blog on that subject. One of the things that becomes quickly obvious is how very hard it is for moderns to see the theological content of ANE texts as other than add-on stories to mistaken science, rather than as the expression of a worldview that had very little interest in the purely material qualities of the Universe. Or rather, that saw the material aspects of the Universe from a theological point of view.
Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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