I may not be an apologist, historian, or scientist, but I am a communist creationist. For me, either life starts with an Other with the power of being (someone eternal), or there is no life at all. And more specifically, that Other is the God of the Bible. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the God who stepped into His creation in the person of Jesus. I don't intend to give a rigourous proof for these statements, but there is one thing to note when confronted with the Bible's dramatic opening line, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" and what immediately follows.
This account of creation was not written in a vacuum. Not according to Jewish tradtion anyway (whether you want to believe what Jewish people have to say is another matter entirely). Moses didn't write about God as Creator because of some philosophical musings that popped into his wandering mind one day. Moses wrote about God as Creator because he witnessed this God turn water into blood, bring a plague of locusts upon Egypt, and lead His chosen people to freedom by parting a sea. Moses and the children of Israel experienced God the Creator in dramatic fashion, which is why it ain't no thang for Moses to begin the chronicles of God's dealings with His creation by stating the fact that God is the Creator of everything. I mean they claim to have seen Him manipulate creation in all manner of ways, and their existence as a nation is at least some kind of evidence that they might just be telling the truth.
The upshot of all of this is that one can't ignore the witnesses of old when drawing conclusions about creation. Some of these witnesses claim to have seen God control creation in miraculous ways. Other witnesses claim to have seen the same God begin a new creation through the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Isn't there a chance that they might actually be telling the truth?
This account of creation was not written in a vacuum. Not according to Jewish tradtion anyway (whether you want to believe what Jewish people have to say is another matter entirely). Moses didn't write about God as Creator because of some philosophical musings that popped into his wandering mind one day. Moses wrote about God as Creator because he witnessed this God turn water into blood, bring a plague of locusts upon Egypt, and lead His chosen people to freedom by parting a sea. Moses and the children of Israel experienced God the Creator in dramatic fashion, which is why it ain't no thang for Moses to begin the chronicles of God's dealings with His creation by stating the fact that God is the Creator of everything. I mean they claim to have seen Him manipulate creation in all manner of ways, and their existence as a nation is at least some kind of evidence that they might just be telling the truth.
The upshot of all of this is that one can't ignore the witnesses of old when drawing conclusions about creation. Some of these witnesses claim to have seen God control creation in miraculous ways. Other witnesses claim to have seen the same God begin a new creation through the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Isn't there a chance that they might actually be telling the truth?
Ask yourself this. How much of your faith is actually bestwoed in Man?
ReplyDeleteI dare say quite a lot. Far be it for me to mock, but I will admit that I admire your bravery. Men are liars, cheats and vagabonds. You, me, him and the weird guy in the corner, all of us.
I can barely trust myself, why would I trust a man I've never met who wants to tell fanatstical stories of yore that he 'witnessed'? Perhaps so I can maybe follow him to the heaven he describes? No, thank you.
Been a christian for many years. Have grown weary of proofs for resurrection/creation etc. Proof never convinced anyone. Those who were converted by it may never have turned at all. It spawns an sterile, academic faith, one of the curses of modern christianity. More critical is the truth or otherwise of the following statement: "Christ in me, the hope of glory." If you can show proof of this in your life (or mine for that matter) thats all the convincing people will need. Does it work mate, or is it all pious talk?
ReplyDeleteIf a man is dying of thirst there's no point offering him wholesome sand. I peddled the wholesome grains for many years until I choked on their unpalatable truth. and what's that truth.The sand we are offering the world in place of the living water is our niceness, our respectability,our veneer of good reputation, what one guy in another place described as a menstrual cloth.What do you think brother?
@ godsgrasshopper: "Proof never convinced anyone". See Thomas from the Gospels. I don't disagree with everything you say by any means, but..
ReplyDelete@ Niall. Good comment. Don't have much time to reply, but one thing I shall ponder: based on your reasoning I shouldn't trust what you tell me.
Just a follow-up to my brief comment. I think there is definitely an insufficiency when it comes to proof. I cited the Thomas example, but faced with Jesus he could have simply said that the wounds were a fabrication or what have you. If you don't want to believe an act in history occurred then there will almost always be a way out (that's not say this is always ignorance of the obvious: the "way out" may be a well known fact - dead people don't rise again, for example.) Therefore evidence can only go so far, and even cold-hearted belief in the evidence is not the goal. This probably is where much of modern Christianity has fallen down. We produce people who can "believe" that a man rose from a grave never to die again, and yet remain unchanged by this truth. The resurrection becomes just another doctrine to mentally ascend to rather than the beginning of a new creation.
ReplyDeleteThere is of course another extreme. If our proof or evidence is that Christianity "works", then that can easily become something very subjective. I've seen people whom Christianity "works" for, but the Christ they trust and the Christ I trust are quite different. Even Paul, after He had pointed to the Corinthians as "letters from Christ" thus showing that what he was peddling was working, said that "we preach not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord". And in his first letter to these people, he tells of the gospel delivered of first importance: Christ died, Christ was buried, and Christ was raised to life. And loads of people saw Him!
That's our news. We can relay it to people as dead orthodoxy to be "believed" in order to "get to heaven", or we can relay it to people as the foundation of a creation where Christ makes all things new by the power of His Spirit. And those words "power" and "Spirit" are words which we must not sever from the message. It is quite clear the apostle Paul never did, but perhaps today we're too keen to remove the mystical, mysterious aspect of Christianity that reasonable, logical thinkers can write off as "fairy stories". Paul (again!) would call this kind of Christianity as "having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power".