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 attitude. And in another series there, N T Wright has been keen to point out the Bible’s nature as narrative rather than as authoritative text – which is essentially a denial of any legal status for it.

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Posted in Theology | 5 Comments

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…
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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.
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Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 18 Comments

How the human got his hands

A new piece of research tries to help answer the question of how humans became bipedal. The researchers “tested” the hypothesis that carrying became easier with a bipedal gait by observing chimps in the field under conditions where resources were depleted, and found they adopted bipedalism in order to carry things better. QED.

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Song of the .. new year

Part of the reason for paucity of new posts over the last week or so is writing and recording a new (and rather odd) song, now called Miserere. I’ve stuck it up on the website in case you’re interested. That now completes the album, so at some stage I’ll put the whole thing up on the site, but I need to get a CD sleeve etc sorted out for “the UK market” (ie both my friends) first.

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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.
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Posted in Creation, Science, Theology | 10 Comments

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 of the literature: it would be a genre without any parallels. What allegory there is in the Old Testament (eg Judges 9) is of a completely different, more specific, type. So sorry, guys, it’s just a non-starter.

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

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 20th century, over against the current liberal theological claims: the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture, the deity of Christ, his virgin birth and miracles, his penal death for our sins, and his physical resurrection and personal return. Not quite “bomb them into theocracy,” then.

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Posted in Science, Theology | 19 Comments

The philosophical foundations of science – sand?

One of the things that surprises me greatly is how little support materialism gets from philosophy. In fact, materialism is rejected so much as a matter of course, apparently, that philosophers seldom even make much of it. This is because, according to those in the field, it is simply untenable as a worldview. I gather that most of the history of materialist philosophy is contiguous with the history of Marxism – and with the latter more or less in terminal decline the former is also largely a museum piece.

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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.

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Posted in Creation, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment