The Hump of the Camel

This was posted to me by Penman, corroborating the position of Augustine and Irenaeus: 

 Now, nothing in creation had gone astray with regard to their notions of God, save man only. Why, neither sun, nor moon, nor heaven, nor the stars, nor water, nor air had swerved from their order; but knowing their Artificer and Sovereign, the Word, they remain as they were made. But men alone, having rejected what was good, then devised things of nought instead of the truth, and have ascribed the honour due to God, and their knowledge of Him, to demons and men in the shape of stones.
(On the Incarnation of the Word 43:3)

Penman also points out that the only people who pleaded for a corrupt natural realm in the time of the Early Church were the Gnostics. They attributed the alleged “evil” in nature to the activity of a Demiurge permitted to pervert the goodness of the true God. That has a remarkably modern feel to it in relation to what many TEs seem to advocate, only they give the Demiurge a name: “Evolution.”

One more passage and I’m through. Romans 8.18ff is often used both by Creationists to show that death resulted from the fall, and by others to show that the death and decay in it is not God’s will. A careful study shows that this is a complete misinterpretation, and here is an essay by me, and a rather better one by Dan Leiphart demonstrating this.

In summary, the Bible contains no doctrine of a fallen natural creation, but rather that now, as at the beginning, it is good and entirely the work of God. The small number of passages often used to deny this actually don’t do so.

I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to find it liberating not to have to pick the good bits out of the unpalateable mess in worshipping God, though I have to work on re-educating my taste-buds. Furthermore, if we are intended to worship God for the whole of his creation, but instead attribute large chunks of it to human sin, or Satan, or creation’s adolescent rebellion, or God’s poor design, then might not the Lord think it a little – well – ungrateful of us? Or even blasphemous?

A few scattered thoughts on the search for a better theodicy next time.

Mainstream Christian belief is that we live in a fallen world, in the sense that the natural creation is dysfunctional and responsible for “natural evil”. Some theistic evolutionists reject the fall as a factor (or reject the fall altogether!), but still see the creation as tainted by death and “sin”, the latter understood as meat eating, parasitism, animal suffering and so on. They sometimes invert the Biblical picture and say that this imperfect creation resulted in mankind’’s sin. I disagree.

Either way, this dysfunction would be a pretty key factor in life, and so the corruption of nature ought to be a major theme in the Bible’’s teaching, right? In fact, it isn’’t mentioned at all. Continue reading →

One of the virtually axiomatic doctrines of modern Christianity is the corruption and fall of the natural world along with man’s moral nature. Natural evil is accounted to be a result of sin, not only in the sense that men suffer and die from disease or disaster, but also in the sense that these exist in the natural world at all.

In the controversy over origins, this is a stumbling block to Biblical literalists, one of whose arguments is that if mankind was born into a world already long-established in the business of death and decay, it is a denial of the original goodness of the creation from Genesis 1. It is almost as much of a problem for Christians believing in evolution, or Old Earth Creationists, since there then needs to be another explanation for natural evil in the pre-fall world. Answers range from a rather implausible spread of the fall’s effects backwards in time, to versions of theology in which God is not fully responsible for creation, perhaps through allowing it some kind of freedom of action of its own. Some Christian evolutionists have even considered Intelligent Design blasphemous for implicating the loving God of Jesus Christ in the examples of disease or “poor design” we encounter. Continue reading →