- Feb 17, 2005
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I really don't know whether this is spamming. I have some good points about origins and creation theology, I promise!
No, I didn't start Internet fasting early. Instead I was away from my usual setup enjoying myself in Sydney. Lots of personal thoughts and things. But the highlight of it was, of course, enjoying the Hillsong Conference '07. It was a powerful time of ministry for me and a good opportunity to realign myself with God's power, love, and will.
=========
The most important thing that I realized was that my time here at CF.com had taken a really heavy toll on the emphasis of my spirituality and theology. I'd been looking a lot into Genesis, into creation theology and the intertwining of Spirit, Scripture, and science, into miracles, into the cultural and theological roots of geocentricism, into the science surrounding evolution. Slowly I was drawn away from gazing and admiring and meditating upon the Cross and the empty tomb (if indeed, as I see a little reason to doubt, the tomb being empty is pivotal to the point God was making in the Resurrection). I still had plenty of fun pointing out to creationists that the final, definitive revelation of God was Jesus Christ dead and risen, not the Bible - but I'd stopped living it. And thus God's things dried up for me, even though I'm now closer to studying creation than I've ever been in my life.
I believe that this is the big danger of creationism that we haven't really taken a good, solid look yet - that it turns Christians away from the Cross. The Crucifixion is at the heart of Christianity, and the God-man hanging to die is the ultimate expression of God's love. And yet the creationists' emphasis on their interpretation of creationism takes our eyes off Jesus - we don't see God's love in the Cross ... but in the "fact" that God originally created a paradise on Earth. No longer "God so loved the world that He sent His only Son", but "God so loved the world that He created the heavens and the earth in six days and did it wonderfully so that nothing died in it." And if there is any doubt about it, ask: what is the answer to suffering? Certainly it is the fact that God loves us in suffering - and creationist organizations elaborate on that not simply by saying that God suffered with us on the Cross but that God made a world without suffering.
What does that do for devotion? I can ask God to bring me to the Cross. But I cannot approach Eden at all this side of Heaven - there are angels with flaming swords warning me that reality without physical death is simply incomprehensible mathematically and thermodynamically, that deathlessness is a thing of eternity and not of time. The disciple whom Jesus loved, His mother, the centurion, the myopic soldiers and the mocking priests were there at the crucifixion, and Jesus appeared afterwards to 500 at a time - but who has seen the Creation, and who can tell me what the original "cat ancestor" who must have given rise to the lion, tiger, cat, panther, cheetah, and lynx all at once looked like? Not even the creationists. This convinces me that creationism, consciously or unconsciously, will inevitably drift away from the Cross as it absorbs more and more of the scientism of the world.
=========
My Biblical dissatisfaction with creationism was also spurred by a night session we had, with Chris Tomlin leading music followed by Louie Giglio's presentation "Indescribable" (near bottom of page - "Significant Insignificance" and "Astronomical Grace"). Chris Tomlin's recent song of the same name, presented during the music time, is brave enough to quote the Bible:
Now when Giglio started throwing scientific facts around I began to feel apprehensive. Surely I had not spent my last cent to hear a creationism presentation! Thankfully, he was wiser than that. Oh, he certainly shared about the beauty, majesty, and intelligibility of the universe. He wowed the crowd (most of it, anyway, I imagine
) with the sheer size of galaxies, the length of even a humble light-year, the vastness of space, the Pale Blue Dot photo. He even called God the "star-breathing God", the God who leads the starry host out by name, who pulls the Pleiades together. But nowhere did he ever have to appeal to incredulity. To awe, certainly - but they are not the same thing! Giglio never once had to insinuate science's wrongness to proclaim God's greatness - not once did he base any point on the idea that the whole shebang was only millenia old. He discussed the Milky Way, without proposing that due to arm rotation it couldn't have existed for billions of years - and discussed the Vela pulsar and stellar evolution (in extreme briefness) without bringing up the strawman about insufficient supernova remnants. Indeed, science was his friend (as were scientists), and throughout one could certainly infer - if one wished - that he was grateful: without science you could never know these things!
The creationist position by contrast builds awe on incredulity. Science doesn't understand, therefore God. A created object is more beautiful if we cannot replicate it, and even more beautiful if we cannot even understand it. By no means! And the Bible will never support such a position. Read the Psalms of praise from creation - God's love is unfathomable not because creation is unfathomable but because God is unfathomable. Or read Colossians 1:17 - and does not my computer, which man understands, and evolved life, which man does not yet fully understand, equally and wonderfully hold together in Jesus Christ?
=========
The preachers were wonderfully playful with the Bible. They did it so much that I got uncomfortable with some of it! Particularly Jentezen Franklin, who to me took far too much liberty with some of the images of the Bible that are certainly historical coincidences more than theological codes. He said, for example, that in the Bible, windows are always opened by human action, while doors are opened or shut by God at times - and therefore we must move heaven to advance in our ministries! He also quoted the story of Noah, where it says that the fountains of the deep were broken and then the windows of heaven were opened - the lesson being that brokenness on earth, of course, leads to open windows from heaven. Never mind that the "window" was a window of judgment and destruction that devastated Earth!
And so it went, though I must say that much of it built me up - the exceptions were essentially exceptions which proved the rule. This only made my position on interpretation far more real than I've ever known: Scripture interpreted non-literally cuts deeper and closer and works more powerfully than Scripture interpreted as a mere chronicle of history ever could. Many images were raised, some from Scripture, some suggested by it, some plain ingenious inventions by the speakers. A humble weasel can kill the mighty eagle which swoops down and grasps it as prey, if the eagle doesn't let go even as the weasel bites into its heart - so we must let go of the things which eat us up from the inside. Peter is the Rock, or Stone, on which Law was written at Mount Sinai, while John's name means Grace, so that Grace outraced Law to the empty tomb of Jesus and was the first to discover and comprehend this mystery. As I sat and watched them play with the words of Scripture, juggling it around to create images I had never imagined, I realized how little I knew of reading the Bible and how far I still have to go, even in Genesis.
It was beautiful. And yet the irony is that given typical and Australian Christian demographics, many who attended the conference would have been dyed-in-the-wool YECs. If I had told any of them that I believed that Genesis 1 was meant to be interpreted non-literally, most of them would have prayed for my deliverance and condemned me when I refused to budge. Yet they would sing of divinely hurled lightning bolts, and they would stand and clap and shout when Bishop T. D. Jakes told them that the last night of the conference was their Last Night on The Boat - that Peter went a-fishin' on in the last chapter of John's Gospel - a crowd seated on dry land in the Acer Arena rejoicing that a preacher had prophesied that he was going to sink their ship! Praise the Lord that I'm jumping out of Peter's boat - but if a day is anything other than a day in Genesis 1 (which we aren't even denying, really), woe betide those who twist the Word of God. What an incredible cognitive dissonance.
=========
But more than anything there was an emphasis on the love of God. Pastor Joseph Prince shared powerfully and beautifully about how the grace and love of God could overcome any evil in the human heart. When our steady gaze on the love of God overcomes our desire for human approval, then we will grow and become whole. There was a similar emphasis as many of the speakers were asked in less formal interviews what they thought of criticism. Their answers converged eerily: win those whom you can, forget those whom you can't. Ed Young spoke of how, although every hound howls at the full moon every night, the moon does nothing but keep on shining. Jentezen Franklin talked of how those who criticized leaders often accomplished far less than the people they were attacking, and Bishop Jakes compared them to chickens who do nothing but flap their wings clucking at the eagle who constantly bewilders and enrages them.
I felt this to be a lesson to me. A lot of times I have been posting for personal defense, in the need to win the enemy (or the "lost"!) over, subconsciously being propelled by the distant, delicious hope of gloating over someone being prodded by the evidence to the point of falling over and admitting that I was, after all, right. Where is the love of God in this? Where is the power of the Cross and the glory of the Resurrection in crossing swords about science and creation? I don't think it's impossible to engage in love. It is difficult, and the lopsided emphasis of creationism on origins makes it that much harder to make the Cross the center (the "crux") of Christian discussion. But I refuse to believe that it is impossible. We need to be utterly Christian (Christ-ian) about creation and examine creation theology and creationist fallacy from the viewpoint of the cross. We reject the creationist emphasis on (skewed) science as a primary revealer of God - but we have to constantly and consistently reintroduce the Cross as His revelation, to remind them that we wish to know God as much as they do.
=========
We must let nothing - "neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation" (Romans 8:38-39 ESV) - take our thoughts off the extravagant love of God.
That's why I'll be glad to start fasting soon - July 22nd, probably - from the Internet and from CF.com in particular. It's time to rebalance my life and bring God's love back into the picture, and make sure I lay hold of the Crucifixion and Resurrection in everything I see and do.
No, I didn't start Internet fasting early. Instead I was away from my usual setup enjoying myself in Sydney. Lots of personal thoughts and things. But the highlight of it was, of course, enjoying the Hillsong Conference '07. It was a powerful time of ministry for me and a good opportunity to realign myself with God's power, love, and will.
=========
The most important thing that I realized was that my time here at CF.com had taken a really heavy toll on the emphasis of my spirituality and theology. I'd been looking a lot into Genesis, into creation theology and the intertwining of Spirit, Scripture, and science, into miracles, into the cultural and theological roots of geocentricism, into the science surrounding evolution. Slowly I was drawn away from gazing and admiring and meditating upon the Cross and the empty tomb (if indeed, as I see a little reason to doubt, the tomb being empty is pivotal to the point God was making in the Resurrection). I still had plenty of fun pointing out to creationists that the final, definitive revelation of God was Jesus Christ dead and risen, not the Bible - but I'd stopped living it. And thus God's things dried up for me, even though I'm now closer to studying creation than I've ever been in my life.
I believe that this is the big danger of creationism that we haven't really taken a good, solid look yet - that it turns Christians away from the Cross. The Crucifixion is at the heart of Christianity, and the God-man hanging to die is the ultimate expression of God's love. And yet the creationists' emphasis on their interpretation of creationism takes our eyes off Jesus - we don't see God's love in the Cross ... but in the "fact" that God originally created a paradise on Earth. No longer "God so loved the world that He sent His only Son", but "God so loved the world that He created the heavens and the earth in six days and did it wonderfully so that nothing died in it." And if there is any doubt about it, ask: what is the answer to suffering? Certainly it is the fact that God loves us in suffering - and creationist organizations elaborate on that not simply by saying that God suffered with us on the Cross but that God made a world without suffering.
What does that do for devotion? I can ask God to bring me to the Cross. But I cannot approach Eden at all this side of Heaven - there are angels with flaming swords warning me that reality without physical death is simply incomprehensible mathematically and thermodynamically, that deathlessness is a thing of eternity and not of time. The disciple whom Jesus loved, His mother, the centurion, the myopic soldiers and the mocking priests were there at the crucifixion, and Jesus appeared afterwards to 500 at a time - but who has seen the Creation, and who can tell me what the original "cat ancestor" who must have given rise to the lion, tiger, cat, panther, cheetah, and lynx all at once looked like? Not even the creationists. This convinces me that creationism, consciously or unconsciously, will inevitably drift away from the Cross as it absorbs more and more of the scientism of the world.
=========
My Biblical dissatisfaction with creationism was also spurred by a night session we had, with Chris Tomlin leading music followed by Louie Giglio's presentation "Indescribable" (near bottom of page - "Significant Insignificance" and "Astronomical Grace"). Chris Tomlin's recent song of the same name, presented during the music time, is brave enough to quote the Bible:
Who has told every lightning bolt where it should go
Or seen heavenly storehouses laden with snow
Who imagined the sun and gives source to its light
Yet conceals it to bring us the coolness of night
None can fathom
If I were being cheeky I'd say: Maxwell, Bjerknes, Rutherford, and Erastosthenes. But a worship service is a bad time to be cheeky and so was the writing of Genesis 1. Should I lecture Tomlin for not knowing about electrostatics, meteorology, thermonuclear fusion, and a spherical earth? Yet it is as silly to chastise the writers of the Bible and suppose that they must be wrongheaded if evolution really happened!Or seen heavenly storehouses laden with snow
Who imagined the sun and gives source to its light
Yet conceals it to bring us the coolness of night
None can fathom
Now when Giglio started throwing scientific facts around I began to feel apprehensive. Surely I had not spent my last cent to hear a creationism presentation! Thankfully, he was wiser than that. Oh, he certainly shared about the beauty, majesty, and intelligibility of the universe. He wowed the crowd (most of it, anyway, I imagine
) with the sheer size of galaxies, the length of even a humble light-year, the vastness of space, the Pale Blue Dot photo. He even called God the "star-breathing God", the God who leads the starry host out by name, who pulls the Pleiades together. But nowhere did he ever have to appeal to incredulity. To awe, certainly - but they are not the same thing! Giglio never once had to insinuate science's wrongness to proclaim God's greatness - not once did he base any point on the idea that the whole shebang was only millenia old. He discussed the Milky Way, without proposing that due to arm rotation it couldn't have existed for billions of years - and discussed the Vela pulsar and stellar evolution (in extreme briefness) without bringing up the strawman about insufficient supernova remnants. Indeed, science was his friend (as were scientists), and throughout one could certainly infer - if one wished - that he was grateful: without science you could never know these things!The creationist position by contrast builds awe on incredulity. Science doesn't understand, therefore God. A created object is more beautiful if we cannot replicate it, and even more beautiful if we cannot even understand it. By no means! And the Bible will never support such a position. Read the Psalms of praise from creation - God's love is unfathomable not because creation is unfathomable but because God is unfathomable. Or read Colossians 1:17 - and does not my computer, which man understands, and evolved life, which man does not yet fully understand, equally and wonderfully hold together in Jesus Christ?
=========
The preachers were wonderfully playful with the Bible. They did it so much that I got uncomfortable with some of it! Particularly Jentezen Franklin, who to me took far too much liberty with some of the images of the Bible that are certainly historical coincidences more than theological codes. He said, for example, that in the Bible, windows are always opened by human action, while doors are opened or shut by God at times - and therefore we must move heaven to advance in our ministries! He also quoted the story of Noah, where it says that the fountains of the deep were broken and then the windows of heaven were opened - the lesson being that brokenness on earth, of course, leads to open windows from heaven. Never mind that the "window" was a window of judgment and destruction that devastated Earth!
And so it went, though I must say that much of it built me up - the exceptions were essentially exceptions which proved the rule. This only made my position on interpretation far more real than I've ever known: Scripture interpreted non-literally cuts deeper and closer and works more powerfully than Scripture interpreted as a mere chronicle of history ever could. Many images were raised, some from Scripture, some suggested by it, some plain ingenious inventions by the speakers. A humble weasel can kill the mighty eagle which swoops down and grasps it as prey, if the eagle doesn't let go even as the weasel bites into its heart - so we must let go of the things which eat us up from the inside. Peter is the Rock, or Stone, on which Law was written at Mount Sinai, while John's name means Grace, so that Grace outraced Law to the empty tomb of Jesus and was the first to discover and comprehend this mystery. As I sat and watched them play with the words of Scripture, juggling it around to create images I had never imagined, I realized how little I knew of reading the Bible and how far I still have to go, even in Genesis.
It was beautiful. And yet the irony is that given typical and Australian Christian demographics, many who attended the conference would have been dyed-in-the-wool YECs. If I had told any of them that I believed that Genesis 1 was meant to be interpreted non-literally, most of them would have prayed for my deliverance and condemned me when I refused to budge. Yet they would sing of divinely hurled lightning bolts, and they would stand and clap and shout when Bishop T. D. Jakes told them that the last night of the conference was their Last Night on The Boat - that Peter went a-fishin' on in the last chapter of John's Gospel - a crowd seated on dry land in the Acer Arena rejoicing that a preacher had prophesied that he was going to sink their ship! Praise the Lord that I'm jumping out of Peter's boat - but if a day is anything other than a day in Genesis 1 (which we aren't even denying, really), woe betide those who twist the Word of God. What an incredible cognitive dissonance.
=========
But more than anything there was an emphasis on the love of God. Pastor Joseph Prince shared powerfully and beautifully about how the grace and love of God could overcome any evil in the human heart. When our steady gaze on the love of God overcomes our desire for human approval, then we will grow and become whole. There was a similar emphasis as many of the speakers were asked in less formal interviews what they thought of criticism. Their answers converged eerily: win those whom you can, forget those whom you can't. Ed Young spoke of how, although every hound howls at the full moon every night, the moon does nothing but keep on shining. Jentezen Franklin talked of how those who criticized leaders often accomplished far less than the people they were attacking, and Bishop Jakes compared them to chickens who do nothing but flap their wings clucking at the eagle who constantly bewilders and enrages them.
I felt this to be a lesson to me. A lot of times I have been posting for personal defense, in the need to win the enemy (or the "lost"!) over, subconsciously being propelled by the distant, delicious hope of gloating over someone being prodded by the evidence to the point of falling over and admitting that I was, after all, right. Where is the love of God in this? Where is the power of the Cross and the glory of the Resurrection in crossing swords about science and creation? I don't think it's impossible to engage in love. It is difficult, and the lopsided emphasis of creationism on origins makes it that much harder to make the Cross the center (the "crux") of Christian discussion. But I refuse to believe that it is impossible. We need to be utterly Christian (Christ-ian) about creation and examine creation theology and creationist fallacy from the viewpoint of the cross. We reject the creationist emphasis on (skewed) science as a primary revealer of God - but we have to constantly and consistently reintroduce the Cross as His revelation, to remind them that we wish to know God as much as they do.
=========
We must let nothing - "neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation" (Romans 8:38-39 ESV) - take our thoughts off the extravagant love of God.
That's why I'll be glad to start fasting soon - July 22nd, probably - from the Internet and from CF.com in particular. It's time to rebalance my life and bring God's love back into the picture, and make sure I lay hold of the Crucifixion and Resurrection in everything I see and do.
