The Little Friar

Read part 3 here.

It's quite appropriate, I think, that my 1000th post should deal with this issue.  Yesterday I wrote a piece about the nature of biblical truth and facticity that brought a reader to ask this question:  "You seem to be hinting that you don't believe in creation science.  But doesn't the vast amount of creation science confirm what read in Genesis 1?  Doesn't that support the Bible's truth and trustworthiness?" First, let me be honest:  "Creation science" certainly aims to support Genesis 1.  And it succeeds in certain places.  But I think its greatest weakness is that it ignores the readings of Genesis 1 that make the most literary and theological sense.  There are many "creation research" organizations, with many different methodologies, so the following evaluation of their methodology may not apply to every organization out there.  But it tries to describe a trend I have seen repeatedly in the reasoning of these organiz...

Some Christians get enthusiastic about Big Bang cosmology or Intelligent Design.  They think that both contribute to a notion that life, and even the very universe, has a beginning.  A "moment of creation". But I think that excitement rests on a basic misunderstanding of the Christian doctrine of creation.  The doctrine of creation is not an attempt to describe the way the universe or life  began -- it isn't a quasi-scientific statement about the origins of the universe or life, and it thus has no special interest in questions of life's early history. Charles Darwin once put it this way:  "I had no intention to write atheistically.  But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design ...  There seems to me too much misery in the world.  I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the parasitic wasps with the express intention of their larva f...

What we need now is a theology of the quotidian -- after developing a theology of beginnings and endings. What might I mean by "a theology of the quotidian"?  We need a theology of the daily, of the everyday, even of the mundane.  I'm using the word quotidian because Captuo uses it in The Weakness of God and it's a key term in the creation theology described by David Kelsey in his book Eccentric Existence , the creation theology I'd like to borrow to help re-package the last two posts. I'm going to be taking a cue from Kelsey who bases his work in Eccentric Existence upon the creation theology in the OT Wisdom literature rather than upon Genesis 1-3.  And as Kelsey notes, the Wisdom literature "teaches no dogmatic formulation about creation".  Regarding origins and endings these are questions that the Wisdom literature seems uninterested in asking and answering.  The world just is.  Existence is just taken for granted. There are a...

Let me pick back up on developing my theology of revolt .  During the last installment, the take-away lesson is that the Bible doesn't have all that much to say about the origins of evil.  Evil seems to predate the biblical story.  It's the "void" of Genesis 1.2 or the snake in the Garden or the missing backstory about the satan.  To be sure, we can sketch in some of these details, and lots of Christians have.  But I wonder, and this was the general point I wanted to make in the last post, if we shouldn't follow the Bible's lead on this and not speculate overmuch about the origins of evil.  Perhaps the most biblical thing we can do is do what the Bible does:  Assume evil exists and confess that God is that Spirit that moves over creation bringing order, beauty, goodness and light.  We can confess at least that much.  Why evil exists, I can't say.  But I can confess that the Spirit of God is, right now, bringing light into t...

Continuing the series that deals with developing a contemporary theology of revolt, I want to turn today to my reading of the Genesis story.  Specifically, I want to lay out why I think Genesis is the creation of the good world by a vulnerable God. This strong vision of a weak God requires that we deal with some very real questions about Creation and New Creation.  Specifically, how do we understand " omnipotence ", particularly that part that seems to depict God as a powerful creator in the first chapter of Genesis? First, there's the "traditional" reading of Genesis.  On this view, Genesis 1.1 sets up 1.2.  In this reading the first act of creation (1.1) is God creating a chaotic and formless world -- the deep (found in 1.2).  From there God begins to impose order on the chaos (1.3 and following). Then, there's another reading, this one originating in Jewish theology.  For this reading, Genesis  1.1 is not read as an act of creation but re...