C. John Collins, Reading Genesis with C. S. Lewis

thank you it's it is really good to be with you and it was very moving to listen to the various stories from the different ministries that are represented here and I thank God for the opportunity I'll just apologize ahead of time I've been very very poorly for about two and a half months or so and I wish I could tell you that I was tonight that I was like the guy that went into the hospital and had his entire left side amputated and he's alright now but not feeling entirely all right but we'll muscle our way through it anyone familiar with discussions about believing Genesis in the modern world can recognize a set of statements as representative samples and they're there for you on your handout how can you say that you believe the Bible when you don't accept what it plainly says about the age of the earth in the Origin of Species or why would you bother to base your life on an ancient book like the Bible the writers thought the world was flat and that the sky was a dome or the ancient world universally believed that the dome like vault of the sky is a glassy crystalline solid some commentators attempt to avoid the force of the statement by claiming the scriptures using phenomenal language the language of appearance but that's our problem the Israelites would not have seen it that way the sky didn't just look solid to them they believed it to be a solid now I've encountered those first two in conversations the first one would come from the lips of a biblical creationist and the second one from a skeptical non-believer the third comes from a more sophisticated source or as in a book and it's a couple of geologists writing to introduce Christians to modern geology Christian scholars writing this each of these remarks assumes that some kind of literal ISM is the proper way to read the biblical text and that that is indeed what a primitive and ancient Israel would have taken for granted for my part what I find in Genesis 1 through 11 is a highly imagistic depiction of actual places persons and events including the presence of phenomenal language and I also judge that imagistic language can offer a true message but since not everyone agrees with that how can we make this more rigorous well in my study what I'm aiming to do is to draw ideas from theories in linguistics literary study and rhetoric and bring them to bear on a reading strategy for Genesis 1 through 11 now these disciplines are normally quite separate in the university curriculum but they nevertheless share a set of common concerns and questions such as what kind of text is this what authority relationship exists between the author and his audience what setting does the text assume by which it is to be received that is to say is it normally received by public reading is it sung in corporate worship is it consumed by private reading or some other setting how does the author choose words and descriptions to influence the dispositional stance of his audience what's the text intended to do to and for its recipients and how does the organization of the text support or hinder its apparent intended effect well I'm gonna draw on studies from these disciplines with a particular orientation I'm gonna take CS Lewis a twentieth-century literary scholar and Christian writer as an example of someone who displayed an intuitive grasp of these concerns whose reflections on the reading process when engaged with these disciplines can help us to formulate a critically rigorous reading strategy for Genesis 1 through 11 Lewis paid no mind to the curricular boundaries of these separate of the separate disciplines and I shan't either what God has joined together after all man ought not to be about separating so Lewis and I make no apologies for invoking Lewis st. Louis a lot and my students sometimes ask me when did I invite CS Lewis into my heart and so on but in any case Louis Lewis sets the tone for interpretation when he opens his work a preface to Paradise Lost with this statement the first qualification for judging which includes interpreting any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a Cathedral is to know what it is what it was intended to do and how it is meant to be used well straight away Lewis has drawn our attention to three aspects of a work of literary craftsmanship what it is that brings us into contact with questions of things like genre style register what's the relationship of the literary form and the content then what it was intended to do what effect does the work aim to produce in its users and then thirdly how is it meant to be used what kind of users are envisioned by the work what knowledge and beliefs do they share in common and amongst themselves and also with the author what kind of social setting is the normal locus of use it's been common for us to treat interpretation as a way into the mind of the author well that's pretty hard to get if the author has been dead especially a long time in fact everybody who knew the author has also been dead a long time what we have now is the text and we have the text as an act of communication between an author and an audience an act of communication to which we are invited to listen we weren't a part of the original communication and we have to do our best to reconstruct the original communicative situation that aspect of the author's mind that we have access to is the text in its context which in our case includes the Canon and a whole lot more but at least that and Louis directs our attention in this direction when he says this but all art is made to face the audience nothing can be left exposed however useful to the performer which is not delightful or at least tolerable to them we must therefore consider what these repetitions he's talking about a particular phenomenon in the in the the epic literature of ancient Greece we must therefore consider what these repetitions do for the hearers not what they do for the poet and we may observe that this is the only aesthetic or critical question good poetry means not the poetry men like composing but the poetry men like to listen to or to read just as an example that the Lewis doesn't go into you sometimes see people discussing say with acrostic psalms and and they talk about the the the aid that that writing and acrostic might give to the author and the only proper response to that is who cares it's rather what it does for the audience that matters and that's that's the concern of the interpreter so we're looking for the impact on the audience religiously this is what matters as well the biblical writers are the divinely authorized tellers and interpreters of the big story which focuses on their texts in their contexts so for the faithful our interest is less about the author's minds and more about the story that they tell and what that story does for us and to us well that's what I've set out for in the study that I'm working on and you can see in the handout what my overall a plan is the the outline and so forth and I even have a chapter there that's addressing Devon's excellent question about other readers and so forth so because you know great minds run in the same ruts I suppose so I'm going to attribute to you a great mind or or a rut you you decide so but let me go from the outline to what I think are my areas of contribution my aim is to be able to articulate the function of Genesis 1 through 11 in relation not simply to ancient Israel but to the modern Christian I intend to cover a lot of topics along the way such as the meaning of words like history and genre words that are often batted about without with utterly unregulated meanings how do we talk about God's action in the world how was that how would that relate to what the sciences study how would that relate to what the biological sciences study why ancient backgrounds should play a role in our study of this sacred text and how they should do so and so forth and I suggest that my general methodology should also bear fruit and studying the rest of the Bible as well but I'm gonna let others be the judges of that but that's just I'm sort of putting that out there since a lot of you speaking are pastors there there's the kinds of things that we encounter all the time as we're seeking to interpret the Bible and to bring it to bear on a contemporary congregation one of the things I want to do is to retrieve the word rhetoric from its current place in the poky along with words like semantics and politics words that we now dismiss by adding the qualifier just that's just rhetoric that's just semantics that's just politics CS Lewis put it this way I do not think and no great civilization has ever thought that the art of the rhetorician is necessarily vile it is in itself noble though of course like most arts it can be wickedly used both these arts rhetoric and poetry in my opinion definitely aim at doing something to an audience the proper use of rhetoric is lawful and necessary because as Aristotle points out intellect of itself moves nothing the transition from thinking to doing in nearly all men at nearly all moments needs to be assisted by appropriate states of feeling poetry certainly aims at making the readers mind what it was not before so I don't think we've given enough attention to the way in which the biblical materials shape persons within faithful communities with the fitting set of likes and dislikes so that they can lean into the world in a way that is true to our creativeness and our relationship to God our Creator our relationship particularly to our fellow believers to the to the rest of humankind around us and to God's world but I want to single out four areas where I think my research can add to our study of Genesis 1 through 11 and the first is the area of types of language in an essay that was apparently a draft chapter of some larger work Lewis made some observations about the way we can describe the same thing from different angles and he presents to us three sentences all portraying a cold night the first it was very cold second there were thirteen degrees of frost and the third bitter chill it was the owl for all his feathers was a cold the hair limped trembling through the frozen grass and silent was the flock in wooly fold and numbed were the beads men's fingers each of these sentences describes a winter night but they do so in different ways and the first sentence is what we can call ordinary language it's how English speakers talk and regular day-to-day speech the second is what we can call scientific because it's what people are people will use when they're concerned with measurements that can be tested with an instrument and it allows them to predict the various effects of the cold on the animals and the plants the third sentence is poetic it conveys more of what it would be like to experience the cold night now Lewis points out that the scientific and the poetic languages are specialized usage of the ordinary language so you see the little diagram there on your handout what are the features of these kinds of language well the distinguishing feature of ordinary language is that its level of detail is adequate for the communication at hand that is to say we're happy to use round numbers and so on and we don't think that we have told an untruth when we use a round number further ordinary language is phenomenological that is to say we speak in terms of what things look like we say of the Sun that it rises it doesn't matter whether we work at JPL or at Covenant seminary we still say the same thing and and we're not we're not involving ourselves in a theory of the physics of these things we say of a rainstorm that the windows of heaven have opened we say of our children's shoes that they're getting too small for the children's feet it doesn't follow of course if that's how literally we think the events work we rightfully as a matter of fact get irritated when somebody interprets our words too closely well scientific language aims at a high level of detail with as little ambiguity as possible and it seeks to explain the inner workings of what it describes it's not enough to say of a cut on your skin that it healed it's important to detail what the cells do which ones do what by what means how fast they do it and so forth so we can call the scientific language analytical because it's because it's interested in distinctions poetic language aims to allow the reader to imagine what it was like to see what it describes even at times when what it describes isn't real and even if we have no experience of what it describes Lewis put it this way this is the most remarkable of the powers of poetic language to convey to us the quality of experiences which we have not had or perhaps can never have to use factors within our experience so that they become pointers to something outside our experience if I if I were talking about the Psalms I would go into ways in which the Psalms then would would you employ these poetic powers to shape the inner being of the people who sing them but I'm trying to keep myself on track here so to achieve this effect poetic language tends to be more imagistic than ordinary language often its level of detail is higher than that of ordinary even higher than that of the scientific language if you look at the three sentences the the most detailed sentence that I gave you was the poet and you it's it's highly concrete you think about the the hare jumping along the frozen grass you think about the owl fluffing himself up you even can feel your own fingers as you if you were telling your beads and so forth so those details however are there to convey the quality of the experience so these literary and linguistic features serve the communicative purpose of the poetic text which is to sell a rate what it describes or to mourn over it or to enjoy the description or to enable the audience to see things differently and so on and so forth so we can fill out our chart so that the there's a spectrum from ordinary to scientific language as you go from more phenomenal to more analytical or from ordinary language to poetical language from more phenomenal to more imagistic and we should avoid some common misconceptions for example we ought not suppose that the scientific language is more literal in the sense that it lacks metaphor in fact all of our talk being about anything beyond immediate sense experience is metaphorical and philosophers of science are well aware of the role of models in scientific theories models are a kind of metaphor further we ought not to imagine that poetic language is of itself any less referential than ordinary or scientific language that is to say a poem can be about something in the external world just as much as a scientific description can be many wrongly think that because poetry involves emotion therefore express it expresses the emotion for its own sake and therefore it's limited in what it can say about the real world well the truth is as Lewis put it poetic language often expresses emotion not for its own sake but in order to inform us about the object which aroused the emotion now any of these language types can express an arousing motion so emotion cannot be the distinctive province of the poetic Lewis asks us to imagine the sentence 50 Russian divisions landed in the South of England this morning which would certainly arouse a great deal of emotion as Lewis put it momentous matter if believed will arouse emotion whatever the language well in the same way with ordinary language the mere fact that an ordinary description we've not specified all the details of the inner workings of the events say the relative movements of the earth and the Sun when we speak of a sunrise and so forth hardly means that we haven't spoken of a real event the question of in what way particular kind of language involves a commitment on the speaker's part to some conception of these inner workings will come up later but but that's we have to be thinking about that when we talk about the way in which a sentence is to be treated as true well the distinction then between these language uses stems from the communicative purposes to which we put the language so it would be foolish to ask which of these uses is best because the only response to that is best for what for a man to express affection to his children usually ordinary language is the way to go if he's going to tell his wife how much he loves her he would do well to get more poetic and hint I'm speaking to mostly a male audience there and wish for you to be happy at home if on the other hand a physician is diagnosing an ailment so that the pharmacist knows exactly how much of which medication the patient should take was very relevant to my current experience and how often and so forth then he's going to find the scientific description the best so Amelia Bedelia if you have children you're familiar with him Amelia Bedelia and in cooking she has a little bit of this and a little bit of that won't do and I'm certainly pleased that the physician did not choose that approach for me these different language levels can also serve differing social and rhetorical purposes for example if I use a poetical statement I may be implying that the subject matter deserves the extra effort that it takes to work through the imagery and so you you have a passage for example in proverbs 5 drink water from your own cistern a father urges his son to do that and and you I'm not going to go through the entire passage but you've got to work with that passage but before you figure out what's what does it mean to drink the water well it if you you will actually see that various Bible translations have tried to help you like to the today's English version or the New Living Translation and so far they've tried to help you and solve the problem for you and they've really taken away from you the effort it takes to process it and the drinking water from your own system we're referring to finding erotic enjoyment in your wife but then it raises the question why should your streams be spread abroad and some translations will render that as don't you son go and be promiscuous but rather the whole idea is the water source is the wife you would not wish for her to be promiscuous you should not treat her that way so that the the whole argument is a do unto others as you would have them do unto you but you got to work with that and so the poetic form demands of you that you actually work with that and so there's there's a statement being made by the use of a poetical form it's its meaning is not right there on the surface it's not supposed to be using scientific language with its claim to precision can function as an exercise in wielding authority because the numbers settle all disputes and also the style of modern scientific reading writing creates an atmosphere of distance from the object of study rather than saying I used five milliliters of this fluid the writer says five milliliters of this fluid were used and the person who did the work fades from the picture altogether well that's the glory of the sciences of course its universality namely that a Christian a Hindu and an atheist should all find the same results so long as they all do the same things which is a point that you were making earlier we don't care who designed the airplane we fly in so long as they follow the universal rules of science and engineering but it's also a danger the universality depends on abstracting away everything that makes for particular cases that is everything that makes for real experiences and in fact not everything is suited for numerical description Lewis sites from a poem by Robert conquest observation of real events includes the observer heart and all the common measurable features are obtained by omitting this part that's that that would be very very current in current in the philosophy of science nowadays Lewis was writing this back in 1954 way ahead of the game everybody's playing catch-up with Louis these days so in its proper sphere say the inferences of a Sherlock Holmes scientific language cannot be beat outside of its proper sphere say the inferences of a father brown it is actually a hindrance to knowledge so all three of these types of language are similar as well in that their speakers expect the audience to fill things in that is to bring to bear knowledge of the world and values that they share in common for example ordinary language is rarely if ever unqualified if I say that I never take a sick day from work a reasonable person will realize that I mean ordinarily of course there may be exceptions if I instruct my children always tell the truth I don't mean that they should give up any Jews they're hiding when tormentors come to the door and I expect them to appreciate that that is to say we normally speak with respect to something and that's regardless of which level of language we're using so each of these language types can speak truth they do so differently and for different purposes and so the key is to ascertain what we have in the particular text that we're studying well that leads me to my second contribution what we might call audience criticism that is to say it's an assessment of who the audience was what their experience of the world was and what their needs were and how the text addressed those needs rhetorician z' have a transparent name for this i wish everybody were as transparent as the rhetorician z' on this point but in any case they call it the rhetorical situation thank you guys rhetorical situation I'm quoting here from Lloyd Bitzer a well-respected rhetorician from Wisconsin rhetoric rhetorical situation may be defined as a complex of persons events objects and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse introduced into the situation can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence any exigence is as an imperfection marked by an urgency it is a defect in obstacle something waiting to be done a thing which is other than it should be now even though his term was transparent the writing isn't totally transparent there until he gets to the end that it's an imperfection marked by an urgency it's it's how you want the situation to change so I'm using in thinking about this the literary concepts of the implied audience and the ideal audience in the pentateuch presentation the implied first audience would be the Israelites who crossed the Jordan River under Joshua's leadership and then each subsequent audience should imagine themselves as the heirs of this first one they knew this first audience this I played first audience knew that their God had just crushed the gods of Egypt embodied in the Pharaoh and Genesis 1 through 11 explains why he could do so the God of Israel is far more than just a tribal God he's the one true God who made heaven and earth and Israel has a calling in the world there to be the vehicle of God's blessing to all nations which is the calling of Abraham or Abram in Genesis 12 2 and 3 Israel's God has something to say to the whole world since he created the whole show and since all humankind comes from a common source Israel are about to live in the promised land where they're going to be farmers using the same skills that other people have learned they need to be reassured that this is God's world and that the land is God's land and God has the right to instruct human beings how to live and how to use his stuff the economic situation of the vast majority of Israelites during the pre-exilic era would have been oriented around subsistence agriculture very different from you and me isn't it by the time of the Exile you have an artisan class having developed and you also have merchants and aristocrats however most of the people were still tied to the soil CS Lewis colorfully described this situation in his reflections on the Psalms those ancient Israelites were peasants or farmers when even a king covets a piece of his neighbor's property the piece is a vineyard he's more like a wicked Squire than a wicked King and what the means is as peasants I don't mean to downgrade them at all because they're well familiar with animals of all sorts from the perspective however not of natural history but of the utilitarian needs of subsistence farmers they would already have known a number of things such as that plants and animals reproduce according to their kinds this is not information to them when it comes in Genesis 1 so it stands to reason that the imparting of that information is not likely to be the purpose of saying that in Genesis 1 rather it's more likely the inculcating of a stance towards the things we're talking about that this is God's stuff he has the right to tell us how to use it so Genesis hardly overthrows ordinary our common sense knowledge of the world quite the opposite it endorses it they would have known without much argument that humans are different from other animals indeed they already exercised a kind of dominion over some of the beasts the Dominion is partial however and it doesn't extend to all the beasts and so that leads to historical questions has it always been that way why does it feel wrong and so on and so forth well the literary features of the narrative of Genesis 1 through 11 invite the reader to infer what the image of God is since it never says what that image of God is especially since that description humans in the image of God distinguishes the description of humankind's making from that of the other animals well that means that anything that sets humans apart from the other animals is a candidate four components of that image and a reader has to engage himself or herself to try to figure it out these people already had as a matter of fact a seven-day week in Exodus 16 they have the Sabbath introduced to them a six-day week with a Sabbath they also knew the the seasons that the heavenly bodies mark out as liturgical appointed times their seasons in the liturgical calendar so our Anglican friend is the you're actually they'll be that the church body that is living according to the creation ordinances so there we are and and this would have supplied their rubric for understanding the purpose of the Sun and the moon and the stars to serve human beings as a worship and creature now this might have implications because certainly the peoples around them thought that human that human beings were to serve the deities that were represented by the sun's and the Sun and the moon and the stars however these entities were made specifically for the service of humankind the worshipper of the one true creator God further the audience had experience of various kinds of sacrifices so when Cain and Abel have sacrifices these are sacrifices that are recognizable from the system articulated in Leviticus likewise with Noah's sacrifice in Genesis chapter 8 and so they're using that to interpret the activities that that's going to be important in just a couple of minutes they knew of the technological achievements of superior cultures whether it be the Egyptians or the Mesopotamians from whom their ancestor Abram had had come or whatever perhaps they even knew that some cultures held less technologically developed peoples in disdain hero stories were widely spread as were tales of a great and catastrophic flood they knew that other human clans were scattered throughout the world and that it was possible to contract fertile marriages with at least some of them at least all the ones that they knew perhaps they also knew of Mesopotamians use of fired bricks for building they carry tales of the Mesopotamian origins of their ancestors which no doubt created special interest in that region and they also held that their more recent ancestors had endured harsh servitude in Egypt and that their God had marvelously delivered them from slavery well I don't here have time to or space to develop some particulars such as the likely awareness among the audiences of how the rain comes from the clouds and so forth which would have helped them to realize that when Genesis one speaks of water above the expanse it's making a poetical picture rather than a physical assertion that's my view anyhow but those are other things that we could pursue there is as a matter of fact a well-established tradition of audience criticism and Christian history come back to readers worthy of a full respect here going back at least as far as Eusebius in the fourth century including Augustine Aquinas and Calvin and I'll give just an example from one and this would be John Cholet who flourished in the 15th century and it was an important English scholar and in some ways a proto reformer and he's actually the actual source of an opinion that CS Lewis attributed to Jerome incorrectly apparently Cholet was the premier English man of letters in his era and he was they paved the way for the English Reformation as in certain aspects and he wrote a series of letters to his friend Roy Dollfuss that's just Latin for Ralph but Rudolph that sounds a little bit more posh doesn't it but he wrote this about the early chapters of Genesis Moses arranged his details in such a way as to give the people a clearer notion and he does this after the manner of a popular poet in order that he may the more adapt himself to the spirit of simple rusticity that is to say the way of telling is geared to an audience an audience made up of peasants rather than learn it or elites what Lewis said about the Middle Ages applies here there were ditchers and alewives who did not know that the earth was spherical not because they thought it was flat but because they didn't think about it at all and the point is not to the disadvantage of Genesis mind you Lewis said this but if you compare the Genesis story with the creation legends of other peoples with all those delightful absurdities in which Giants to be cut up and floods to be dried up are made to exist before creation the depth and originality of this Hebrew folktale will soon be apparent the idea of creation and the rigorous sense of the word is there fully grasped but under no circumstance is therefore should we treat Genesis as anything like a scientific account not even what some would call ancient science I know I'm treading on on unsteady ground or at least controversial ground there but I think that the the the evidence is all on the side of that and even the the things with which Genesis is compared from the ancient Near East I think to call them ancient science is really leading us astray rather we allow for things like pictorial description anachronism and symbolism anachronism I'll mention in a moment I see my time is going to run out very soon indeed I mentioned that one goal of the storytelling in Genesis is to provide an alternative story to the one told in other cultures of the ancient Near East especially in Mesopotamia these Mesopotamian stories include divine action and symbolism and imaginative elements and the purpose of those stories is to lay the foundation for a worldview without being taken in a literalistic fashion Genesis 2 aims to tell the story of beginnings the right way to counter the other stories and it offers the divinely authorized way for us to picture the events which then leaves us some leeway in scientific theorizing so my third area is anachronism and history Genesis serves an ideological purpose namely to enable its audiences to see themselves as the proper heirs of the characters that are described in Genesis well with what rhetorical features might have achieved this purpose specifically here we'll explore whether to expect the manner of description to aim for what can be called historical verisimilitude that is to say to try to capture all the details of life exactly as the characters would have known them even if the characters mode of life was quite different from that of the audience we might look therefore for ways in which the text of Genesis invites the audience to see themselves at the events and we might consider whether Genesis might employ anachronism that is to say describing the scenes in terms of the audiences anachronism zand their relationship with history and rhetoric very in fact they force us to define what we mean by the word history I'm going to just kind of cut a long discussion short and simply assert this the real discussion is between what we might call antiquarian history and what we might call rhetorical history we have every reason to expect rhetorical history in the Bible that is to say history told with a particular behavioral and personal shaping and community shaping ends in mind we have every reason to expect rhetorical history in the Bible does that mean though that it's not history in a true sense now of course not we appreciate that an ordinary language to say something that something is historical is to say that there's actual persons and events for it to refer to and these persons and events really existed and so it follows the history is not a literary form it's rather a way of referring to persons and events with a proper moral orientation and that's what we need to mean when we use the word history well in rhetorical history especially when the subject matter is the distant past as we have in prehistory and proto history which is what Genesis 1 through 11 is we might expect to find anachronism possibly even in abundance depending on the rhetorical purpose a scholar of comparative literature Joseph Lutze draws on Goethe to the effect that the poet cannot report past events without imparting his own moral worldview to his character so the moral worldview is involved but not only that Lucy also comments on a well-known literary anachronism found in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar when a clock strikes and there are chimes which of course didn't exist in the time of Julius Caesar Shakespeare likely understood that the ancient Romans marked time by sundial and not pendulum presumably however he also realized that his audiences would respond more instinctively to chimes than to an imagined shadow of a sunbeam as a harbinger of imminent tragedy that is to say a concern for historical verisimilitude would actually diminish the effect on the audience so the anachronism actually improves the telling rather than diminishes the the telling certainly I'm not drawing a strong parallel between Shakespeare's historical plays in the Bible please don't hear what I didn't say and I expect that the biblical audiences had a higher expectation for the actuality of the persons and events than Shakespeare's audiences did nevertheless the rhetorical device is a helpful one and it's misleading only if the audience had reason to believe that the narrative offered antiquarian information let me just focus on one of these there's every reason to suppose that Adam is portrayed in Genesis as if you were an idealized Israelite the garden is like the Israelite sanctuary the the audience were familiar with the sanctuary they were familiar with the agricultural work that they would be called to do in Palestine and Adam is described and the garden is described in terms of things that they're already familiar with some of our have argued from noticing this that this means that Adam is not presented as a real person but as some kind of personification of Israel that is exactly backwards the point is rather for the Israelite to see himself or herself as the proper heir of Adam because he's presented in such a way that enables the Israelite reader to embrace his role in a people Israel that is God's fresh start on humankind the rhetorical history model that I'm advocating and allows us to see that the antiquarian would allow us to see that the antiquarian model would actually get in the way all right finally a worldview story many today are familiar with the paradigm creation fall Redemption consummation probably because of the AL Walters book creation regained lots of good things in that book however it would be a mistake to suppose that that construct is a product of the Dutch Reformed I'm sorry if you're you know I can't in your Calvin College guys it actually precedes you by many many centuries and so as Louis articulates it in several places he says for example Christianity going on from the Hebrew Bible makes world history in its entirety a single transcendentally significant story with a well-defined plot pivoted on creation fall Redemption and judgment well as a matter of fact I think that's a pretty fair summary of early Christian thinkers like Irenaeus in the late 2nd century Athanasius in the early 4th century structures his confrontation his day incarnate siano incarnate sione around that storyline but I'll defer discussing that for another time I think this narrative underlies the Nicene Creed if we allow that the fall is included in the phrase who for us men and for our salvation otherwise what did we need saving from I think this also accurately describes what we have in the Bible but I'm going to move on well this outlook actually helps us though because agreement on this basic shape of the story or of a story that's like this doing the same job can serve as a diagnostic criterion for common or mere Christianity which is a thing that I hold dear as as you do as you mentioned just a little while ago that is to say what supports this story is inside this common Christianity and what counteracts the story is outside and further this way of describing things enables us to see whether scientific theories really are at odds with the faith by asking whether they would have us change the shape of the story so suppose that a medieval theologian might have conceived of the earth as stationary and I don't we can still tell the same story and so that changing one's view of that does not alter the story that you tell and so you're not altering your religious faith a story orientation offers another advantage in the latter part of the 20th century students of worldview came to appreciate that a community inculcates its worldview into its members by means of its big story a big story that answers the key questions where did we come from what's gone wrong what has been done about it whether by the gods or by nature or by man or some combination of the above where are we now in this whole process and where is the whole thing headed well the story situates the communities members in their places in the world it calls them to indwell the story and to participate in its out working to play their part in it as it unfolds so the worldview describes the way that the community members lean into life how they relate to the divine to others and to the world around them and it comes to the community as a story if the worldviews story is well told it captures the imaginations of those who own it and it drives them on and holds their loyalty at the same time tellers if such stories are quite sure that the story that they tell is in some sense true that is to say it refers to real events and the proper interpretation of those events well some have suggested that the phenomenon of a worldview story is a feature primarily of pre-modern and pre-scientific peoples but that's a mistake modern Western culture does just the same for example a prominent evolutionary biologist Georg Gaylord Simpson who died in 1984 drew this conclusion from his study of evolution man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind he was not planned well that's a story it's a bleak one but it claims to put our lives into perspective doesn't it actually if that's the true story of the world it sounds like a heightened version of what Macbeth described in Shakespeare's play once he discovered that Lady Macbeth had committed suicide life's a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing well it's that on steroids I guess well the biblical story as Christians have traditionally understood it therefore functions as a big story and its components then are a good creation marred by human fall into rebellion where God is active to redeem humankind and all they affect which God will bring into final judgment and complete fruition so it's not a local tale but it deals with a Linton and nor does it deal with a limited group of people but it tells the big story of the whole world well if Genesis 1 through 11 is to serve as the front end of the as of this big story we can recognize that like other claimants to be the true big story it has an historical impulse behind its writing from its style and function as prehistory and proto history we can also see that to call its focus ancient science takes us away from the text whether we think that that science is now discredited or if we think that science is authoritative science as such may indeed play a role in constructing the worldview story but to make it effective it will need to be rendered into a poetic amid iam and the conclusions will go beyond the power of the sciences into what CS Lewis called myth making which is what George Gaylord Simpson has done in that statement that I just gave you so just just to wrap it up then I agree with those who take the purpose of Genesis to be first to oppose the origin studies of other ancient peoples by telling of one true God who made heaven and earth and who dignified humankind with a special nobility the task of ruling the world wisely and well and the cohesion of Genesis one through eleven with the rest of Genesis also points the way towards appreciating both the meaning of the whole book and the place of Genesis 1 through 11 within the book namely that the people of Israel are heirs of Abram to whom God made all these promises in Abram is God's fresh start on humankind for the for the sake of the entire world Gilbert roarson who wrote in the replies two essays and reviews obscure exchange back in the 1860s captures well why the way that the story begins matters a great deal he said a law of life for the individual present a hope for the individual future must each repose on a doctrine of the collective human past all creeds must cast anchor on some scheme of beginnings cosmogony x' may be sober and sound or they may be frivolous and foolish but it was always seen as it is evidence still that to forego a cosmogony is to dispense with a religion so of course Genesis begins with a cosmogony now that my time has run out let me draw on Louis's close friend JRR tolkien for a sense of how we would apply Genesis 1 through 11 in Christian Proclamation in one of his letters Tolkien wrote we all long for Eden and that's that that's part of the pastoral ministry is to bring to people's present awareness that yearning so that so that they are so that the solution to that yearning the answer to that yearning becomes actually audible to their souls the Genesis story explains why this is so it also offers hope for its fulfillment and then when Frodo was leaving the shire forever I'm sorry if that spoils the story for you but it is it is the case and it doesn't happen in the films you have to read it in the sacred books he entrusted the red book of Westmarch to Sam's keeping with these instructions for how Sam was going to lead the hobbit community in using the book we can use this as an analogy for how we use the Bible reading the Bible aloud in church and you will read things out of the red book and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone so that people will remember the great danger and soul of their beloved land all the more that the the purpose of reading the Bible then in church involves remembering this great story the the events of the great story including these great conflicts that have presented themselves that have threatened to thwart the divine purposes but have been overcome for the sake of God's people that we would remember and take heart and love our beloved fellowship of God's people and its purpose in the world all the more thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Henry Center

Views: 2,375

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Genesis, C.S. Lewis, C. John Collins, science and faith

Id: bKUD9vCjBm8

Length: 48min 59sec (2939 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 09 2018