As a member of "all and sundry": no it was not a historical event.

There was not a time when God was obeyed and then was not, rather there was a time when people evolved primitive and magical rituals based around death and, as the human species (plural) evolved, the future. The rituals were close and environmental. Later on people developed more explanation around these rituals and more a sense of a people and history, inventing patriarchs and mythic journeys, and identified those with present situations. Thus in Babylon were set down past histories.

You read this book - the Bible - as if it has some sort of privileged insight into history or making the universe or whatever. It isn't: it is rather a book of identification of a people that developed over time. It tells us nothing globally or universally, not does it tell very much at all that is historical or scientific, and why would it, and how could it.

David

There follows my attempt to respond to the parts of your posts 4 March, 24 February, 22 February (in that order) I have not yet replied to.

March 4 Your point about Paul’s use of the creation/fall account…etc:

I am not sure what you mean when you say ‘even though the rest of the OT works with very different ways of expressing human sin and the hope of salvation’. The writers of the New Testament and Jesus himself don’t appear to me to be conscious of any difference between the way they understood human sin and the salvation Christ brings. On the contrary, as you know, they quote constantly from the Old Testament. In Romans 1 Paul paints the picture of the human condition in all ages after the fall and quite likely has in mind as illustrating this the early chapters of Genesis. He quotes from the Old Testament to support his assertion ‘proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin’.

March 4 Gen 1:29-30 and Gen 9:3:

Just to underline, though you no doubt realize it, my line of argument is to establish the point that God in Genesis 1 gives only the green plant to the creatures. God’s regret has been fully expressed in the passage leading up to the flood. And clearly, the permission to eat meat is an act of mercy in a fallen world with a cursed earth/land. I don’t consider that you can avoid the exegetical connection I am making by saying ‘the focus of this passage clearly lies elsewhere’. As I have said before, whatever the genre of these passages the verses under discussion must be there for a reason. We can’t just ignore them.

March 4 Romans, Colossians, Isaiah passages:

You say I am regularly assuming a “literal reading (and thus finding ‘facts’)”

If you examine my 21 and 23 February postings I think you will see that the only facts I am finding are that that Gen 1:29-30 and 9:3 must mean something whatever the genre and that

‘at some point the human race disobeyed God and that from that point on the whole human race became alienated from God and in need of salvation And that this disobedience and this alienation was a historical event’

(Incidentally I invited all and sundry including your good self and the Fulcrum leadership to indicate whether you agree with the sentence immediately above – I repeat that invitation again).

On Paul’s letter to the Romans: In my view written by Paul to the Christians at Rome. Having not visited them but being eager to preach the gospel to them, he writes. From 1:16 to at least 8:39 the argument he sets out is a continuous connected one, with subordinate clauses so to speak. Is this common ground? If so, what do you make of my assertions about the right understanding of 8: 19-23?

To be continued.

Phil Almond

Dear Phil,

Thank you for your post and for engaging with my own offerings. I confess to struggling a bit to respond with the care and details the debate needs. I note further and (no doubt) characteristically detailed posts are imminent from you …  but here are a few further thoughts.

Firstly a correction. Gen 9.3 is linked to Gen 1.29-30 -  you are right to correct me on this. I was working too fast and from one translation. Careless of me.
(I also accept that there is an interpretive debate to be had over how Paul uses the creation story and the significance of this. But it is not enough just to say Paul uses the Creation/Fall account as core even though the rest of the OT works with very different ways of expressing human sin and the hope of salvation. At the very least we need to explore how Paul’s theology builds from his own scriptures and relates to these. You are not claiming he simply by-passes the rest of the OT and hangs everything on Gen 1-3?)

But back to Gen 1.29/9.3!
I still think you cannot draw from this link the conclusion your argument needs. Yes a link is there – but what is the significance of it? There is no sense of regret or tragic concession in the adding of flesh to the human diet in 9.3 is there? Wouldn’t you expect that if we are meant to hear a tragic pre and post fall connection? If anything it simply reads as if more variety has now been added to human diet – with no apparent regret at this fact. The passage lends no support to a ‘before’ (veggie) and ‘after’ (flesh eating) scenario. You need to persuade me that is not a reading into the text.
As I said before, the focus of this passage clearly lies elsewhere and that should make us wary of pressing it into support of a question it is not trying to answer. The passage underlines what 1.29 affirms – that sustenance in God’s creation is based upon mutual need and interdependence – and this therefore needs respecting.  That’s it. And that remains a very contemporary challenge.
The core significance of Gen 9 lies in the command to honour of the sanctity of life and the human vocation is to safeguard that – it is part of what it means to have dominion. Von Rad notes - ‘Even when a man slaughters and kills, he is to know that he is touching something which, because it is life, is in a special manner God’s property; and a sign of this is that he is to keep his hands off the blood. (Genesis Comm)

One reason this discussion is so hard is that we are not agreed what kind of literature we are reading about here. ‘Twentieth-century Western culture seems to me particularly inept at understanding and using figurative or symbolic literature. We are so accustomed to straightforward, matter-of-fact descriptive prose that we expect nearly all writing to be of that form … scientific writing has made an illegitimate claim of superiority over artistic literature.’ (Van Till)
Everything turns on this. You are regularly assuming a literal reading (and thus finding ‘facts’) where I find an ancient respected literary approach to truth telling and enquiry – a kind of parable, a symbolic story that offers a way of reflecting upon our pre-history ad seeks meaning and truth within it.  We have no contemporary equivalent of this kind of writing and easily ‘read’ it with very modern assumptions about how to understand it. The creation/evolution debate is one of the major fault lines.

So it is hard to discuss the detail of the passages you quote (even Isaiah) without some common ground around the following questions.
What kind of language is being used?
What kind of literature is it?
What is the expected audience?
What is the purpose of the text?
What relevant knowledge from outside the text is there may contribute to our understanding  (eg scientific findings)?
(of course these questions need asking of whatever we are reading – but they are vitally important when reading the Bible)

My post on 17th Feb offered one way of responding to these questions.

See Fulcrum newswatch today for various articles relating to the new Theos report by Caroline Lawes, 'Faith and Darwin: Harmony, Conflict or Confusion?', Theos site, 2 March 2009 [pdf].

David

This is the first stage of an attempted response to your 22 February and 24 February postings. However I am not sure I understand the first part of 22 February (start to ‘Fallen cosmos’) so I will try to answer the last part (‘this raises’ to the end). First I have got to give my summary understanding of the Romans, Isaiah and Colossians passages to give my reply a context/framework. I will make a series of assertions. We can debate in detail whether these assertions are right or wrong in subsequent posts.

In Romans 8, ktisis is just ‘sub-human nature’, inorganic and organic: everything except unfallen and fallen angels and saved and unsaved people. Sub-human nature includes the animals. Therefore the animals have been subject to vanity and enslaved to corruption. And the animals are eagerly expecting the revelation of the sons of God, are groaning and travailing in pain together until now (birth pangs) and will be freed from the slavery of corruption to the freedom of the glory of the children of God. The revelation of the sons of God is the same as the adoption, the redemption of our body which Christians eagerly expect while groaning within themselves. So the Christians and the animals await the same consummation, that is, the completion of the process of the Christians salvation when, in Warfield’s words, ‘…at the Judgment day they stand, sanctified souls, clothed in glorified bodies, before the throne of God, meet for the inheritance of the saints in light’.

The Isaiah passage describes what the animals eagerly expect, one of the results of the Messiah’s reign, culminating in the prospect that ‘…they will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain…’.

Colossians 1:20 lends support to the assertions made about the Romans passage. ‘All things’ probably includes the whole of sub-human nature, which, being reconciled through the blood of the cross must at some point have been alienated from God.

Therefore at some point the whole of sub-human nature has been subject to vanity, enslaved to corruption, alienated from God. Two questions: when? and, with what if any observable result? There are only 3 possible answers to the first question: from the beginning, built into the way God has made sub-human nature; at the fall of satan; at the fall of Man. On the second question it has been argued that vanity, enslavement, alienation is about relationships not physical constitution and behaviour, and so the answer is ‘no observable result’, and so there is no problem with the hundreds of millions of years of animal predation which on GAU preceded the appearance of man. In the light of the transformation depicted in the Isaiah passage I find that incredible.

In 24 February you say, ‘There is no explicit link made’ (between 9:3 and 1:29-30). I disagree. NIV has: ‘Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything’. NEB has: ‘…I give you them all, as once I gave you all green plants’. There is an explicit reference in 9:3 back to 1:30. Even if we didn’t know 1:30 existed, 9:3 would tell us that at previous time God gave mankind the green plants for food.

One of your points in 22 February post:

‘The OT never uses these creation/fall stories as foundational in the way that Christian tradition has come to.......In fact the OT never gives any impression that creation is other than what God always intended  the heavens are telling the glory of God. (as does Jesus)’

The New Testament does use them as foundational: Romans 5:12-21 (I am not necessarily using the argument that ‘death’ in 12 includes the death of animals (I don’t think my case needs that view)); 1 Corinthians 15 21-22; Romans 16:20. Likewise the New Testament in the Romans and Colossians passages does give the impression that the creation has been subjected to vanity, enslaved to corruption and alienated from God. Even in this state however the heavens declare the glory of God and leave men without excuse, as Paul says in Romans, and he makes essentially the same point, when speaking of other blessings in Acts, ‘Nevertheless he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness’. To deny that ktisis can both be alienated from God and simultaneously declare his glory and be a blessing is the same kind of mistake as denying that God and Christ can be angry with sinners and simultaneously seek to save them.

More to follow on your 22 February posting.

Phil Almond

It seems to me that the main Darwinian struggle is between sometimes not so well adapted but low resource consuming wildlife that appears quite frequently, and the swarms of resource demanding dominant wildlife that mutates with regularity in ways not obvious regarding the environment but that the swarm forces upon the environment. They protect themselves via dominance, but a severe environmental shift might well see the low resource demanding come through due to sheer flexibility especially as they do adapt. I mean in my environmental patch the Open Office Writer bird is now a preferred species to the dominant Microsoft Word bird swarm, and there are many preferred small creatures that support the environment and activities here that the lumbering species cannot handle as effectively.

Yes, David, but behind that 6 days lies years of evolving technology, mutational cul-de-sacs and, sadly, the deaths of earlier progenitors.

David.  Yes, I agree that Macs are part of the original goodness of creation, though I cannot see how they could have been created within the statutory 6 days of Genesis 1.  I am convinced that my iMac has evolved, with some clever tweeking on the way.

Like you, I had the same cramped, unparagraphed, small font messages on these Fulcrum threads until I switched from Safari to Firefox.  I broke out into natural selection here and have found the latter very user-friendly and another triumph of the evolutionary process.

Yes Peter - what chop suey recipes, pin heads and attempt to flush out Graham's real views - it is getting a bit surreal Phil - thanks for yours & You continue to put lot of weight on the significance of Gen 1.3 and Gen 9.3 and I am not convinced it can bear it exegetically.

Here's why I have my doubts ... It seems reasonable to 'hear' in Gen 9.3 an echo of Gen 1.3 - but is more than an echo? They are separated not only by the sin and expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden but the later obliteration of the entire world (bar Noah's family) in the flood. In 1.3 God (possibly) decrees a veggie diet and in the second it's now veg and meat. But what conclusions can actually be drawn from that?

Gen 9.3 is set within the account of the blessing and ordering of a new creation, post flood. The mood is expansive, generous and inclusive. As part of that God declares that plants and meat are provide for food. The mood of the passage is positive. There is no hint that meat is an addition, or a reluctant concession, a sign of a disordered world, or a change of mind by God since Gen 1.3.

If we didn't know Gen 1.3 existed we would not have known that in a previous verse God only gave plants (apparently). There is no explicit link made. Neither is verse 3 at all central to the concerns of Gen 9 where the main focus is on God's call to humanity to be guardians of the sanctity of life in the world - not part of the original commission in Gen 1-3 and arguably representing here an enhanced vocation in fact &. and, again, recorded here as a positive and important vocation rather than an attempt at problem solving in a disordered world.

Considering he has only recently wiped out the world, God sounds in a very benevolent mood to me. What do you reckon? By the way &. &. no I did not expect you to read Brueggemann and Wright (though I would not be the first person on this thread to set demand levels of home work for the rest of us if I did). But perhaps you don't realise that your comment on B and W is the first clue you have given me that you have actually read that earlier post at all. &. and yes, I too am capable of using scripture to fit my own preferred agendas. We all do it. But in this instance the project is yours not mine.

I have been reading this discussion with interest. The link made by Daysspring to the racist/fascist website was useful for two reasons. First, those old film clips of Duane Gish (and others) are hard to find, and bring back a certain nostalgia. Gish was quite properly renowned for his ability to tell so many lies with so few seconds. In public debate, his opponents were often at a loss to even know where to begin. This technique became known as “the Gish Gallop.”

The second was that they very nicely give the lie to the common creationist claim that “Darwinism=>Nazism.” I am giving a talk on Darwin this week and the notion came to me to base the lecture on “Lies told by Creationists about Darwin.” Following the links out from the site admired by Daysspring, I found a number of racist/fascist/”Christian” sites uniformly opposing evolution and quoting biblical sources for this, and for their racism.  These were very useful.