Questions about Theology of the Cross in creation

[reyvin]

Ok, George has been around this board for a while now and has brought up the term, 'Theology of the Cross' and I'm interested to hear him respond to a few questions. If anyone else has any, feel free to place them here and time permitting, he'll be able to answer them for us and clear up any questions regarding it.

From what I understand, he's suggesting we interpret all of scripture (yes folks, Genesis included and hence why it's in cosmogony) through the lens of Christs' fulfillment when He came.

1 - How can you show that the authors of the OT had this sort of thinking in mind when penning their books?

2 - Is the creation account a scientific, chronological (sequential) description of beginnings, or more an ultimate description of how things came about (aka: the Lord knitting someone together in the womb)?

3 - What does the role of inspiration and inerrancy play in reading the Bible as you (George) would suggest? (Probably two separate questions there)

4 - Is it falsifiable?


I'll throw more into the mix as it comes to me, these were the first few I had in mind at the time.

[shunyadragon]

Ok, George has been around this board for a while now and has brought up the term, 'Theology of the Cross' and I'm interested to hear him respond to a few questions. If anyone else has any, feel free to place them here and time permitting, he'll be able to answer them for us and clear up any questions regarding it.

From what I understand, he's suggesting we interpret all of scripture (yes folks, Genesis included and hence why it's in cosmogony) through the lens of Christs' fulfillment when He came.

1 - How can you show that the authors of the OT had this sort of thinking in mind when penning their books?

2 - Is the creation account a scientific, chronological (sequential) description of beginnings, or more an ultimate description of how things came about (aka: the Lord knitting someone together in the womb)?

3 - What does the role of inspiration and inerrancy play in reading the Bible as you (George) would suggest? (Probably two separate questions there)

4 - Is it falsifiable?


I'll throw more into the mix as it comes to me, these were the first few I had in mind at the time.

Good questions! I think these were questions I think George was interested in on his thread until it became lost in the fog.

I will give them some thought and get back after we hear from George.

[George Murphy]

Ok, George has been around this board for a while now and has brought up the term, 'Theology of the Cross' and I'm interested to hear him respond to a few questions. If anyone else has any, feel free to place them here and time permitting, he'll be able to answer them for us and clear up any questions regarding it.

From what I understand, he's suggesting we interpret all of scripture (yes folks, Genesis included and hence why it's in cosmogony) through the lens of Christs' fulfillment when He came.

The theology of the cross is something broader than a means of interpreting scripture. It means that God is revealed most fully & profoundly in the event of the cross – and by extension in the “crosslike” events, the pattern of death and resurrection, of scripture and of the world. “True theology and recognition of God are in the crucified Christ” as Luther put it.

The concept of a theology of the cross in this sense is due to Luther, and can be found set out in his theses for the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation in Volume 31 of Luther’s Works. I’ll be glad to provide further references when this seems appropriate. By making this connection I am not simply appealing to the authority of Luther or saying that Luther would agree with all the the ways in which I develop this theme.


For that matter I will make no apology for referring to other Christians such as Bonhoeffer or Pascal. Again I am not simply evoking their authority, but I believe that theology, and the interpretation of scripture in particular, is to be done as part of the Christian community, and this means taking seriously the way other teachers of the church have understood the faith.

1 - How can you show that the authors of the OT had this sort of thinking in mind when penning their books?

I don’t know that I can show what was in their mind. I think the concept of inspiration means that God intended some things in scripture that the human writers didn’t have in mind. But we can say the following things about the OT.


a) The main parts of its story do have what I referred to earlier as a “crosslike” pattern of death and resurrection. Creatio ex nihilo, the Exodus (which the church has always seen as a type of Christ’s passion and resurrection – cf. Lk.9:31) and the exile & return are the most important examples.


In connection especially with Gen.1:2 Bonhoeffer (Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 3 (Fortress, Minneapolis, 1998), pp.34-35) says:

“[T]he God of creation, of the utter beginning, is the God of the resurrection. The world exists from the beginning in the sign of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Indeed it is because we know the resurrection that we know of God's creation in the beginning, of God's creating out of nothing. The dead Jesus Christ of Good Friday and the resurrected kurioV of Easter Sunday - that is creation out of nothing, creation from the beginning. The fact that Christ was dead did not provide the possibility of his resurrection but its impossibility; it was nothing itself, it was nihil negativum. There is absolutely no transition, no continuum between the dead Christ and the resurrected Christ, but the freedom of God that in the beginning created God's work out of nothing. Were it possible to intensify the nihil negativum even more, we would have to say here, in connection with the resurrection, that with the death of Christ on the Cross the nihil negativum broke its way into God's own being - O great desolation! God, yes God, is dead. [He has in mind here a line from a 17th century German hymn that says Gott selbst liegt tod.] - Yet the one who is the beginning lives, destroys the nothing, and in his resurrection creates the new creation. By his resurrection we know about the creation.”


b) We see Christ – and especially his passion & resurrection – in the OT because he tells us that they’re there. Cf. Lk.24:27. Christ puts meaning into the OT that hadn’t been seen before. (Which isn’t of course to say that no OT passages had been seen as messianic before Jesus.)

2 - Is the creation account a scientific, chronological (sequential) description of beginnings, or more an ultimate description of how things came about (aka: the Lord knitting someone together in the womb)?

Here I have to expand on some themes of the theology of the cross.


a) God and God’s actions are characteristically hidden under the form of their absence – for nothing is less like our normal ideas of God than a dead Jewish carpenter on a Roman cross. “Truly, you are a God who hides himself” (Is.45:15). This doesn’t mean that God is absent. As Pascal says (with that verse from Isaiah in mind), everything bears the stamp of “the presence of a God who hides himself.”


b) The kenosis, or emptying of Christ in the Incarnation (Phil.2:7) means divine self-limitation for the sake of creation. If this is indeed characteristic of God’s way of working then we may expect that God will also act kenotically in creation. A number of recent theologians have developed a kenotic view of divine action, according to which God limits what is done in the world to what can be accomplished through lawful natural processes. (See, e.g., John Polkinghorne (ed.), The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (Eerdmans, 2001) & my article “Chiasmic Cosmology and Creation’s Functional Integrity” at http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2001/PSCF3-01Murphy.html .)


If this is the case then we will not “observe” God at work in the world but will be able to understand what happens in the world by scientific investigation of lawful natural processes. Thus creatures are not only “instruments” with which God works but are, in Luther’s phrase, “the masks of God behind which he wishes to remain hidden and do all things.”


This means, among other things, that we should expect to understand the developmental history of the universe and of life scientifically. Since the scientific evidence for cosmic & biological evolution is very strong, we should interpret the Genesis creation accounts in a way that is consistent with the scientific picture. The legitimacy of such an interpretation is shown by the evidence within scripture itself (e.g., the comparison of the 2 accounts) which suggests that they should not both be read as accurate historical or scientific narrative.


This requires us to belief that God, in inspiring these texts, was willing to accommodate the divine message to the scientific and historical views of the biblical writers. Such accomodation shows a condescension which is consistent with the idea of divine kenosis.


To return to the question then: The Genesis accounts (note the plural), as well as other creation texts (Ps.104, Col.1:15-20 &c) are to be read as theological statements about God’s relationship with the world and with humanity.

3 - What does the role of inspiration and inerrancy play in reading the Bible as you (George) would suggest? (Probably two separate questions there)

I’ve already commented on inspiration. I don’t think it means that the Holy Spirit gave the biblical writers scientific information about the world. To put it bluntly, the Spirit didn’t do a very good job if that was the divine intent. That’s one of the things that God gave us brains for – it’s part of the equipment of humanity needed to carry out the commission in Gen.1:26-28 to care for creation.


I don’t like use of the term “inerrancy” because it almost automatically carries the connotation of “errorless narrative of historical events as they really happened.” If we’re to speak of scripture as inerrant, we have to take very seriously the different literary genres in the Bible and the intent of the Holy Spirit.

4 - Is it falsifiable?

What is “it”?


In any case, there are problems with a falsibification criterion in either science or theology. I think Lakatos’ description of research programs more accurately characterizes the way science actually works. Nancey Murphy’s Theology in an Age of Scientific Reasoning (Cornell, 1990) deals with this. I can go into more detail but have written enough for now.

Shalom,

George

[reyvin]

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The theology of the cross is something broader than a means of interpreting scripture. It means that God is revealed most fully & profoundly in the event of the cross – and by extension in the “crosslike” events, the pattern of death and resurrection, of scripture and of the world. “True theology and recognition of God are in the crucified Christ” as Luther put it.
The concept of a theology of the cross in this sense is due to Luther, and can be found set out in his theses for the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation in Volume 31 of Luther’s Works. I’ll be glad to provide further references when this seems appropriate. By making this connection I am not simply appealing to the authority of Luther or saying that Luther would agree with all the the ways in which I develop this theme.
For that matter I will make no apology for referring to other Christians such as Bonhoeffer or Pascal. Again I am not simply evoking their authority, but I believe that theology, and the interpretation of scripture in particular, is to be done as part of the Christian community, and this means taking seriously the way other teachers of the church have understood the faith.

]

I'm somewhat familiar to this approach. My pastor once gave an interesting sermon on Numbers 21:2 - 21:9 which seems like a very bizarre story until interpreted with Christ in mind.

I don’t know that I can show what was in their mind. I think the concept of inspiration means that God intended some things in scripture that the human writers didn’t have in mind. But we can say the following things about the OT.
a) The main parts of its story do have what I referred to earlier as a “crosslike” pattern of death and resurrection. Creatio ex nihilo, the Exodus (which the church has always seen as a type of Christ’s passion and resurrection – cf. Lk.9:31) and the exile & return are the most important examples.
In connection especially with Gen.1:2 Bonhoeffer (Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 3 (Fortress, Minneapolis, 1998), pp.34-35) says:
“[T]he God of creation, of the utter beginning, is the God of the resurrection. The world exists from the beginning in the sign of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Indeed it is because we know the resurrection that we know of God's creation in the beginning, of God's creating out of nothing. The dead Jesus Christ of Good Friday and the resurrected kurioV of Easter Sunday - that is creation out of nothing, creation from the beginning. The fact that Christ was dead did not provide the possibility of his resurrection but its impossibility; it was nothing itself, it was nihil negativum. There is absolutely no transition, no continuum between the dead Christ and the resurrected Christ, but the freedom of God that in the beginning created God's work out of nothing. Were it possible to intensify the nihil negativum even more, we would have to say here, in connection with the resurrection, that with the death of Christ on the Cross the nihil negativum broke its way into God's own being - O great desolation! God, yes God, is dead. [He has in mind here a line from a 17th century German hymn that says Gott selbst liegt tod.] - Yet the one who is the beginning lives, destroys the nothing, and in his resurrection creates the new creation. By his resurrection we know about the creation.”

b) We see Christ – and especially his passion & resurrection – in the OT because he tells us that they’re there. Cf. Lk.24:27. Christ puts meaning into the OT that hadn’t been seen before. (Which isn’t of course to say that no OT passages had been seen as messianic before Jesus.)

I don't have a problem with any of this, so we're in agreement here also. Most interesting to me here is: "I think the concept of inspiration means that God intended some things in scripture that the human writers didn’t have in mind." which has been my claim for sometime now as far as inspiration goes.

Here I have to expand on some themes of the theology of the cross.
a) God and God’s actions are characteristically hidden under the form of their absence – for nothing is less like our normal ideas of God than a dead Jewish carpenter on a Roman cross. “Truly, you are a God who hides himself” (Is.45:15). This doesn’t mean that God is absent. As Pascal says (with that verse from Isaiah in mind), everything bears the stamp of “the presence of a God who hides himself.”
b) The kenosis, or emptying of Christ in the Incarnation (Phil.2:7) means divine self-limitation for the sake of creation. If this is indeed characteristic of God’s way of working then we may expect that God will also act kenotically in creation. A number of recent theologians have developed a kenotic view of divine action, according to which God limits what is done in the world to what can be accomplished through lawful natural processes. (See, e.g., John Polkinghorne (ed.), The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (Eerdmans, 2001) & my article “Chiasmic Cosmology and Creation’s Functional Integrity” at http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2001/PSCF3-01Murphy.html .)
If this is the case then we will not “observe” God at work in the world but will be able to understand what happens in the world by scientific investigation of lawful natural processes. Thus creatures are not only “instruments” with which God works but are, in Luther’s phrase, “the masks of God behind which he wishes to remain hidden and do all things.”
This means, among other things, that we should expect to understand the developmental history of the universe and of life scientifically. Since the scientific evidence for cosmic & biological evolution is very strong, we should interpret the Genesis creation accounts in a way that is consistent with the scientific picture. The legitimacy of such an interpretation is shown by the evidence within scripture itself (e.g., the comparison of the 2 accounts) which suggests that they should not both be read as accurate historical or scientific narrative.
This requires us to belief that God, in inspiring these texts, was willing to accommodate the divine message to the scientific and historical views of the biblical writers. Such accomodation shows a condescension which is consistent with the idea of divine kenosis.
To return to the question then: The Genesis accounts (note the plural), as well as other creation texts (Ps.104, Col.1:15-20 &c) are to be read as theological statements about God’s relationship with the world and with humanity.

Ok, this is the part I disagree with: "This requires us to belief that God, in inspiring these texts, was willing to accommodate the divine message to the scientific and historical views of the biblical writers. Such accomodation shows a condescension which is consistent with the idea of divine kenosis."

The 'accomodation' argument is very weak to me. Quoting Holdings' debate with Seely: "It does not do to say that ‘God has sometimes allowed his inspired penman to advert to the scientific concepts of their own day.’ Seely confuses adaptation to human finitude with accommodation to human error — the former does not entail the latter. As I know all too well, having spent several years confronting critics of the Bible, such ‘allowances’ as Seely asserts easily open the door to ridicule of the inspired Word, and the critics are correct to see such rationalizations as Seely’s as totally invalid.
It also opens the door to those who claim that the Bible writers’ teaching on morality was also a reflection of ‘the scientific concepts of their own day’. For example, was their teaching against adultery and homosexual acts in ignorance of the modern scientific ‘fact’ that such behaviour is ‘in the genes’, programmed by evolution?"

Therefore, I believe that there is enough room to understand that God was inspiring for all time as I've argued in other posts.

I don't want to knock us off track with a different discussion yet again, but I had to interject that.

This: "This means, among other things, that we should expect to understand the developmental history of the universe and of life scientifically. Since the scientific evidence for cosmic & biological evolution is very strong, we should interpret the Genesis creation accounts in a way that is consistent with the scientific picture. The legitimacy of such an interpretation is shown by the evidence within scripture itself (e.g., the comparison of the 2 accounts) which suggests that they should not both be read as accurate historical or scientific narrative." is interesting in a couple of different ways. You make a point similar to framework proponents (although they see recapitulation in G2 rather than a totally different account) in that they weren't meant to be read as a point by point science book to begin with. Summary found here: http://upper-register.com/other_stud...pretation.html
The claim about biological evolution (in the macro sense) is still very debatable as shown by the ID movement.

I’ve already commented on inspiration. I don’t think it means that the Holy Spirit gave the biblical writers scientific information about the world. To put it bluntly, the Spirit didn’t do a very good job if that was the divine intent. That’s one of the things that God gave us brains for – it’s part of the equipment of humanity needed to carry out the commission in Gen.1:26-28 to care for creation.
I don’t like use of the term “inerrancy” because it almost automatically carries the connotation of “errorless narrative of historical events as they really happened.” If we’re to speak of scripture as inerrant, we have to take very seriously the different literary genres in the Bible and the intent of the Holy Spirit.

I'll agree in that the Holy Spirit wasn't PRIMARILY concerned with a science text, but I totally disagree that He allowed incorrect information to be 'confirmed' in His book.
My position is that Genesis 1 is not scientific enough to be a science textbook, but not *unscientific* enough to just be the work of unaided ancient man. I agree with Pearce, "The Bible may not have been written
with the object of teaching science, nevertheless, the Bible is not unscientific, for hidden within its story is a Creator's knowledge":

"To say that a work is not a textbook on science is different from declaring that a book is scientifically inaccurate, yet that is often implied by similar statements. A person could write a book on a nonscientific subject and yet give evidence of a background knowledge of science. For instance, there are on sale two children's books of animals; both are attractively produced. One appears to present the animals at random without scheme or order. The other indicated a knowledge of zoological taxonomy and the order of appearance of life on earth. The order in which the animals are presented in the latter would not convey this to the child enjoying her animals, but if she grew up to read zoology and happened to come across her childhood book she would recognize that the author had a greater depth of knowledge than was overtly apparent. He had been able to meet the simple pleasure of childhood and yet satisfy the sophistication of maturity. Likewise, the Bible story of creation is presented for man's childhood in picturesque portrayal
of the goodness of God in His Creation and purpose in man. But now that mankind has reached maturity in knowledge and science, an informed person can detect that in the story of Creation, the Creator's knowledge is endemic; the order of geophysics and biology is correct, though expressed in general and picturesque terms. ... The Bible may not have been written with the object of teaching science, nevertheless, the Bible is not unscientific, for
hidden within its story is a Creator's knowledge." (Pearce E.K.V., "Who Was Adam?," Paternoster: Exeter UK, 1969, pp.17-18)

What is “it”?
[color=black][font=Verdana]In any case, there are problems with a falsibification criterion in either science or theology. I think Lakatos’ description of research programs more accurately characterizes the way science actually works. Nancey Murphy’s Theology in an Age of Scientific Reasoning (Cornell, 1990) deals with this. I can go into more detail but have written enough for now.

'It' is what we're discussing; this Theology of the Cross idea. I'm a Murphy fan also. :)

[lucaspa]

a) The main parts of its story do have what I referred to earlier as a “crosslike” pattern of death and resurrection. Creatio ex nihilo, the Exodus (which the church has always seen as a type of Christ’s passion and resurrection – cf. Lk.9:31) and the exile & return are the most important examples.

I can see that the Exodus is creatio ex nihilo -- God creates a nation out of nothing.

However, Genesis 1:3 is not necessarily creatio ex nihilo. The waters are already there, God didn't say "Let there be water". So, there is doubt whether you can really apply creatio ex nihilo to Genesis 1.

In connection especially with Gen.1:2 Bonhoeffer (

Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 3 (Fortress, Minneapolis, 1998), pp.34-35) says:

“[T]he God of creation, of the utter beginning, is the God of the resurrection. The world exists from the beginning in the sign of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Indeed it is because we know the resurrection that we know of God's creation in the beginning, of God's creating out of nothing. The dead Jesus Christ of Good Friday and the resurrected kurioV of Easter Sunday - that is creation out of nothing, creation from the beginning.

Bonhoffer appears to be conflating two different concepts: creation out of nothing and creation from a beginning. But I have problems with his second sentence: Jews knew for at least 500 years about God's creation of the universe before Jesus' resurrection. Bonhoeffer seems to have overlooked that inconvenient fact.

b) We see Christ – and especially his passion & resurrection – in the OT because he tells us that they’re there. Cf. Lk.24:27. Christ puts meaning into the OT that hadn’t been seen before. (Which isn’t of course to say that no OT passages had been seen as messianic before Jesus.)

Luke can't count here. After all, we are asking if the OT authors had the "creation of the cross". Since Luke knew about the resurrection, it's easy for him to try to retrodict Jesus into the past. After all, he spends a lot of the gospel trying to get Jesus to fit the OT passages about the Messiah, when it's obvious that Jesus doesn't fit them at all.

This requires us to belief that God, in inspiring these texts, was willing to accommodate the divine message to the scientific and historical views of the biblical writers. Such accomodation shows a condescension which is consistent with the idea of divine kenosis.

You talk of "kenosis", of limitations, and then talk of "willing to accomodate". God was limited in what He could tell about how He created because He was limited by the language of the human authors. The Bible has no Glossary of new terms. God can't explain how He created, because He is limited by the vocabulary of the people of the time. What were the Hebrew words for "geological epoch", "plate tectonics", "DNA", "natural selection", etc?

I find it ironic that, after talking about limitations, you shy away from a major limitation of God's communication with humans.

To return to the question then: The Genesis accounts (note the plural), as well as other creation texts (Ps.104, Col.1:15-20 &c) are to be read as theological statements about God’s relationship with the world and with humanity.

Very good.

In any case, there are problems with a falsibification criterion in either science or theology. I think Lakatos’ description of research programs more accurately characterizes the way science actually works. Nancey Murphy’s Theology in an Age of Scientific Reasoning (Cornell, 1990) deals with this. I can go into more detail but have written enough for now.

There are problems with naive falsification. Pierre Duhem showed that. However, falsification works just fine. Lakatos' research programs have problems in that, when you look at the history of science, even the central statements of research programmes have been falsified. I prefer Popper. It's how science actually works in the lab. But we can discuss this in more detail later.

[George Murphy]

I'm somewhat familiar to this approach. My pastor once gave an interesting sermon on Numbers 21:2 - 21:9 which seems like a very bizarre story until interpreted with Christ in mind.

It seems likely that the use of this story in Jn. 3 is influenced by the targum on Numbers, which says that those who looked at the serpent were healed "if their hearts were fixed on the Name of the Memra ["utterance"] of the Lord."
The Memra (which is a development of the prophetic "Word of YHWH") is probably one of the things behind the Logos concept in Jn.1.

Ok, this is the part I disagree with: "This requires us to belief that God, in inspiring these texts, was willing to accommodate the divine message to the scientific and historical views of the biblical writers. Such accomodation shows a condescension which is consistent with the idea of divine kenosis."

The 'accomodation' argument is very weak to me. Quoting Holdings' debate with Seely: "It does not do to say that ‘God has sometimes allowed his inspired penman to advert to the scientific concepts of their own day.’ Seely confuses adaptation to human finitude with accommodation to human error — the former does not entail the latter. As I know all too well, having spent several years confronting critics of the Bible, such ‘allowances’ as Seely asserts easily open the door to ridicule of the inspired Word, and the critics are correct to see such rationalizations as Seely’s as totally invalid.
It also opens the door to those who claim that the Bible writers’ teaching on morality was also a reflection of ‘the scientific concepts of their own day’. For example, was their teaching against adultery and homosexual acts in ignorance of the modern scientific ‘fact’ that such behaviour is ‘in the genes’, programmed by evolution?"

Therefore, I believe that there is enough room to understand that God was inspiring for all time as I've argued in other posts.

I don't want to knock us off track with a different discussion yet again, but I had to interject that.

If the theology of the cross truly is as fundamental as I believe it to be then we need to approach scripture in terms of it rather then in terms of a priori concepts of inspiration & inerrancy. (Which isn't - as I've indicated - to say that there are no legitimate concepts of inspiration & inerrancy, but they should be ones that are informed in a basic way by the theology of the cross.) The concept of "accomodation" should then not be seen as simply a way to deal with what seem to be embarassing limitations of the text but as a basic feature of the way God works.

I don't think that Paul Seely "confuses adaptation to human finitude with accommodation to human error." But the more important question is whether or not God is willing to "accomodate to human error", even if "the former does not entail the latter."

In the 1st place, the distinction isn't as obvious as it may seem. Errors about the nature of the world - e.g., the idea that the earth is flat or that the sky rotates around the earth - are usually due in large part to the limited range of observations available to people.

But the more important point again has to do with the theology of the cross. A God who is willing to be "made sin" (II Cor.5:21) & die in weakness (II Cor.13:4) might be willing to accomodate to human error.

This: "This means, among other things, that we should expect to understand the developmental history of the universe and of life scientifically. Since the scientific evidence for cosmic & biological evolution is very strong, we should interpret the Genesis creation accounts in a way that is consistent with the scientific picture. The legitimacy of such an interpretation is shown by the evidence within scripture itself (e.g., the comparison of the 2 accounts) which suggests that they should not both be read as accurate historical or scientific narrative." is interesting in a couple of different ways. You make a point similar to framework proponents (although they see recapitulation in G2 rather than a totally different account) in that they weren't meant to be read as a point by point science book to begin with. Summary found here: http://upper-register.com/other_stud...pretation.html
The claim about biological evolution (in the macro sense) is still very debatable as shown by the ID movement.

The point here is simply that theology can leave it up to science to determine whether or not life has developed through evolution. I think it has, & that at best the ID movement has pointed out areas that evolutionary theory hasn't explained. It has not yet made any positive contributions to our understanding of the development of life.

But I also have to point out that some IDers - & especially Phil Johnson - are definitely out of synch with the theology of the cross. That theology implies, as I said earlier, that God's work in the world is hidden, and that we must know God in the cross of Christ before we can recognize his activity in the world. 2 of Luther's central Heidelberg theses are:

"19. That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened. [Rom.1:20]



20. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross."

When Johnson says that he believes in a God "who left his fingerprints all over the evidence" he disqualifies himself as a theologian. (& I don't just mean as a professional theologian.)

I'll agree in that the Holy Spirit wasn't PRIMARILY concerned with a science text, but I totally disagree that He allowed incorrect information to be 'confirmed' in His book.
My position is that Genesis 1 is not scientific enough to be a science textbook, but not *unscientific* enough to just be the work of unaided ancient man. I agree with Pearce, "The Bible may not have been written
with the object of teaching science, nevertheless, the Bible is not unscientific, for hidden within its story is a Creator's knowledge":

"To say that a work is not a textbook on science is different from declaring that a book is scientifically inaccurate, yet that is often implied by similar statements. A person could write a book on a nonscientific subject and yet give evidence of a background knowledge of science. For instance, there are on sale two children's books of animals; both are attractively produced. One appears to present the animals at random without scheme or order. The other indicated a knowledge of zoological taxonomy and the order of appearance of life on earth. The order in which the animals are presented in the latter would not convey this to the child enjoying her animals, but if she grew up to read zoology and happened to come across her childhood book she would recognize that the author had a greater depth of knowledge than was overtly apparent. He had been able to meet the simple pleasure of childhood and yet satisfy the sophistication of maturity. Likewise, the Bible story of creation is presented for man's childhood in picturesque portrayal
of the goodness of God in His Creation and purpose in man. But now that mankind has reached maturity in knowledge and science, an informed person can detect that in the story of Creation, the Creator's knowledge is endemic; the order of geophysics and biology is correct, though expressed in general and picturesque terms. ... The Bible may not have been written with the object of teaching science, nevertheless, the Bible is not unscientific, for
hidden within its story is a Creator's knowledge." (Pearce E.K.V., "Who Was Adam?," Paternoster: Exeter UK, 1969, pp.17-18)

Attempts to read a modern scientific picture - even in very elementary form -out of the Genesis accounts usually read them into it 1st. But I don't want to get hung up on interpretations of Gen.1-2 again. I would instead encourage you to examine your presupposition that God couldn't have worked that way in the light of the cross.

'It' is what we're discussing; this Theology of the Cross idea. I'm a Murphy fan also. :)

So let me rephrase your question. The theology-science project that I've been pursuing, "chiasmic cosmology," is an attempt to understand issues of science and technology in terms of a theology of the cross. You're asking if that project is "falsifiable." I would prefer to put it in Lakatosian terms and ask whether it's a progressive or degenerating research program. In favor of the former, I can point out one "novel fact" that the program predicts, the concept of accomodation in the inspiration of scripture. It's true of course that that idea was around long before I was - as Paul Seely points out, the concept is in Calvin. But I didn't use that explicit concept in developing my approach, so this can count as a novel fact - just as the precession of Mercury's perihelion counts as a novel fact even though it was know long before Einstein developed general relativity, because he didn't make any use of it in that development.

Of course you may continue to reject the idea of accomodation & insist that it isn't a true "fact" at all. Therein lies a difference between the natural sciences & theology. I can't just show you orbital data & prove that I'm right.

Shalom,
George

[George Murphy]

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I can see that the Exodus is creatio ex nihilo -- God creates a nation out of nothing.

However, Genesis 1:3 is not necessarily creatio ex nihilo. The waters are already there, God didn't say "Let there be water". So, there is doubt whether you can really apply creatio ex nihilo to Genesis 1.

I didn't say that Gen.1 unambiguously teaches creatio ex nihilo. But it can be understood in that way & by the Maccabean period (II Macc.7:28) the idea was clearly present & connected with belief in the resurrection.

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Bonhoffer appears to be conflating two different concepts: creation out of nothing and creation from a beginning. But I have problems with his second sentence: Jews knew for at least 500 years about God's creation of the universe before Jesus' resurrection. Bonhoeffer seems to have overlooked that inconvenient fact.

Yes, to be more precise one should say that creatio ex nihilo requires creation of the beginning: "The world was not made in time but with time" (Augustine).

But I doubt that Bonhoeffer simply "overlooked" Jewish belief in creation. Israel's belief in creation follows belief in its own creation in the Exodus: Awareness of salvation precedes belief in creation. & as the Exodus, real as it was, reaches its full expression only in the resurrection of Christ, understanding the meaning of creation only reaches its full expression in that light.

Luke can't count here. After all, we are asking if the OT authors had the "creation of the cross". Since Luke knew about the resurrection, it's easy for him to try to retrodict Jesus into the past. After all, he spends a lot of the gospel trying to get Jesus to fit the OT passages about the Messiah, when it's obvious that Jesus doesn't fit them at all.

As I said, Christ puts new meaning into OT texts. & if the NT writers are inspired by the Spirit of Christ, it's not surprising that they do the same things. So the OT texts cited by the evangelists do mean what they say about Christ because they say it!

You talk of "kenosis", of limitations, and then talk of "willing to accomodate". God was limited in what He could tell about how He created because He was limited by the language of the human authors. The Bible has no Glossary of new terms. God can't explain how He created, because He is limited by the vocabulary of the people of the time. What were the Hebrew words for "geological epoch", "plate tectonics", "DNA", "natural selection", etc?

I find it ironic that, after talking about limitations, you shy away from a major limitation of God's communication with humans.

Sorry, I'm missing your point here. I have no argument with what you're saying. This is indeed part of the limitation to which God subjected himself.

There are problems with naive falsification. Pierre Duhem showed that. However, falsification works just fine. Lakatos' research programs have problems in that, when you look at the history of science, even the central statements of research programmes have been falsified. I prefer Popper. It's how science actually works in the lab. But we can discuss this in more detail later.

Well, qua scientist I'm a theoretician & from that standpoint I think Lakatos provides the best description of how theory development & decline work. Maybe it looks different from the lab.

Shalom,
George

[George Murphy]

'It' is what we're discussing; this Theology of the Cross idea. I'm a Murphy fan also. :)

I realized belatedly that in view of your last comment I should have mentioned the book she wrote a few years ago with George Ellis, On the Moral Nature of the Universe (Fortress, 1996). Their approach in terms of kenosis as "the underlying law of the universe" (cf. the closing sentence of the book) has a good deal in common with mine in terms of the theology of the cross.

Shalom,
George

[reyvin]

I realized belatedly that in view of your last comment I should have mentioned the book she wrote a few years ago with George Ellis, On the Moral Nature of the Universe (Fortress, 1996). Their approach in terms of kenosis as "the underlying law of the universe" (cf. the closing sentence of the book) has a good deal in common with mine in terms of the theology of the cross.

Shalom,
George

Thanks for the resource. I've not forgotten this thread, just trying to think how to respond without getting sidetracked yet again.

[lucaspa]

If the theology of the cross truly is as fundamental as I believe it to be then we need to approach scripture in terms of it rather then in terms of a priori concepts of inspiration & inerrancy.

But the "theology of the cross" is itself an a prior concept. So you are inherently contradictory here. I suggest you approach scripture without an a priori theology of the cross -- dropping the theology of the cross doesn't affect the reality of the Resurrection -- and look at how the people for whom the scripture was written understood it.

(Which isn't - as I've indicated - to say that there are no legitimate concepts of inspiration & inerrancy, but they should be ones that are informed in a basic way by the theology of the cross.)

Another statement of your a priori concepts.

In the 1st place, the distinction isn't as obvious as it may seem. Errors about the nature of the world - e.g., the idea that the earth is flat or that the sky rotates around the earth - are usually due in large part to the limited range of observations available to people.

If you look at the people of the time, this is the best SCIENCE of the day! Yes, this is Babylonian science/cosmology. It was the best concept, based on the limited observations, of the shape of the world.

I submit that the authors of Genesis 1 set their theological message in the best science of the day, but that the theology isn't dependent on the science. The theology works just as well in modern science as it did in Babylonian science. See Bernhard Anderson's various books.

The point here is simply that theology can leave it up to science to determine whether or not life has developed through evolution. I think it has, & that at best the ID movement has pointed out areas that evolutionary theory hasn't explained. It has not yet made any positive contributions to our understanding of the development of life.

Notice "evolutionary theory hasn't explained". ID is both god-of-the-gaps and science-of-the-gaps. Basing ideas on gaps in knowledge is poor epistemology whether you are talking science or theology. In the event, whenever those "hasn't explained" are actually examined, we find that ID is wrong: plants and animals are not directly manufactured by God. http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/staff/dave/articles/jtb.pdf

But I also have to point out that some IDers - & especially Phil Johnson - are definitely out of synch with the theology of the cross. That theology implies, as I said earlier, that God's work in the world is hidden, and that we must know God in the cross of Christ before we can recognize his activity in the world. 2 of Luther's central Heidelberg theses are:

"19. That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened. [Rom.1:20]

???? Luther seems to have turned Rom 1:20 on its head. Paul is clearly stating the Argument from Design in Rom 1:20 How did Luther come to this conclusion?

When Johnson says that he believes in a God "who left his fingerprints all over the evidence" he disqualifies himself as a theologian. (& I don't just mean as a professional theologian.)

I submit that Johnson and other creationist have, in reality, no faith. They can't BELIEVE in God, they have to have "proof". To such an extent that they fabricate such proof.

[lucaspa]

I didn't say that Gen.1 unambiguously teaches creatio ex nihilo. But it can be understood in that way & by the Maccabean period (II Macc.7:28) the idea was clearly present & connected with belief in the resurrection.

You sounded as though creatio ex nihilo was umambiguous. Just how did the Jews talk about a resurrection before such a thing actually happened? The Messiah was not supposed to resurrect, but conqueor in mortal life.

Yes, to be more precise one should say that creatio ex nihilo requires creation of the beginning: "The world was not made in time but with time" (Augustine).

That's a separate concept. Augustine is extending the idea of creatio ex nihilo to the idea of time. However, Genesis 1 implies pre-existing stuff for God to work on, and that stuff apparently does not have a beginning.

But I doubt that Bonhoeffer simply "overlooked" Jewish belief in creation. Israel's belief in creation follows belief in its own creation in the Exodus: Awareness of salvation precedes belief in creation. & as the Exodus, real as it was, reaches its full expression only in the resurrection of Christ, understanding the meaning of creation only reaches its full expression in that light.

This is where you throw in a priori assumptions as tho they are fact. You say "Exodus reaches its full expression only in the resurrection of Christ" as tho that is a fact. It's not. I question the statement. Exodus is an expresssion complete unto itself: creation of Israel and a covenant with the Hebrews as God's Chosen People. Now, I agree that Israel knew God as Creator from the creation of Israel and Genesis 1 can legitimately be viewed as a retrodiction of that creation to having God create the entire universe (again, see Bernhard Anderson). Now, I can see you saying that [b[salvation [/b] reached its full expression in the resurrection, but not "Exodus".

As I said, Christ puts new meaning into OT texts. & if the NT writers are inspired by the Spirit of Christ, it's not surprising that they do the same things. So the OT texts cited by the evangelists do mean what they say about Christ because they say it!

That argument isn't legitimate in this context. It's circular reasoning. Look at you -- "mean what they say because they say it". A circle. Theology of the cross, as I understand it, says that the Jesus and the resurrection are integral to the OT. If that is the case, then you are limited to looking ONLY at the OT. Because the NT authors were trying to make Jesus fit the Jewish picture of the Messiah, the possibility exists that they changed/invented details of his life such that those details would fit with what the authors already had in front of them -- the OT. Therefore, the NT is not reliable in relation to your claim.

Sorry, I'm missing your point here. I have no argument with what you're saying. This is indeed part of the limitation to which God subjected himself.

Accomodation does not = limitation. An accomodation is doing something you are not required to do. A limitation is something imposed and you are required to adhere to it. The limited human vocabulary is a limitation for God because He cannot get around it. Just like the Uncertainty Principle is a limitation that keeps God from being omniscient WITHIN the universe because there is no way around it.

Well, qua scientist I'm a theoretician & from that standpoint I think Lakatos provides the best description of how theory development & decline work. Maybe it looks different from the lab.

Even from theory, because theory is always tested in the lab. Lakatos has a good point that major theories have central statements that are not generally questioned and a host of subsidiary statements that can easily be dropped or modified without challenging the central statement. However, it is clear in history that major theories are falsified by data, and not that "research programs" change due to sociological forces. Special creation was falsified, for instance. So was Flood geology. Often it is the people advocating the research program who find the data to falsify it.

I submit that you like Lakatos because it accurately reflects RELIGION. Christianity has core statements that CANNOT be challenged but then a host of statements -- transubstantiation, grace, observance of holidays, etc -- that can be changed. Also, new data doesn't falsify the core statements. Joseph Smith has new revelations, but do Christians all convert and admit that Christianity needs serious modification? Jesus resurrects, but do all the Jews admit that Judaism is seriously flawed and they all become Christians? They don't abandon their research program, even tho you might say that program is not progressing.

OTOH, Adam Sedgwick, William Buckland, Charles Lyell, and others find new data that falsifies the Flood. ALL geologists abandon Flood geology in the 19th century. Watson and Crick crack the DNA helix, and ALL biologists acknowledge that DNA is the hereditary material and abandon other research programs.

[George Murphy]

But the "theology of the cross" is itself an a prior concept. So you are inherently contradictory here. I suggest you approach scripture without an a priori theology of the cross -- dropping the theology of the cross doesn't affect the reality of the Resurrection -- and look at how the people for whom the scripture was written understood it.

The theology of the cross is - among other things - a statement about how scripture should be read, a hermeneutical principle. But it is no an a priori principle in the sense of something imposed from the beginning upon scripture from the outside, for it's something that itself comes from scripture. I Cor.1:18-2:5 & the dominating role that the passion narratives play in all the gospels are just a couple of indications of that.

Dropping the theology of the cross definitely affects our understanding of the resurrection. The essential thing about the resurrection is not just that "someone" was raised but that "Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified" who "has been raised" (Mk.16:6). & the resurrection doesn't get rid of the scandal of the cross but intensifies it, for it means that the one who is present in the church (& in the universe) as the Lord is the crucified one.

If you look at the people of the time, this is the best SCIENCE of the day! Yes, this is Babylonian science/cosmology. It was the best concept, based on the limited observations, of the shape of the world.

I submit that the authors of Genesis 1 set their theological message in the best science of the day, but that the theology isn't dependent on the science. The theology works just as well in modern science as it did in Babylonian science. See Bernhard Anderson's various books.

Notice "evolutionary theory hasn't explained". ID is both god-of-the-gaps and science-of-the-gaps. Basing ideas on gaps in knowledge is poor epistemology whether you are talking science or theology. In the event, whenever those "hasn't explained" are actually examined, we find that ID is wrong: plants and animals are not directly manufactured by God. http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/staff/dave/articles/jtb.pdf

Agreed. I am giving IDers the benefit of the doubt when I say that they point out things that haven't yet been explained scientifically, but even granting that, they have no basis for saying that those things can't be explained in terms of natural processes.

???? Luther seems to have turned Rom 1:20 on its head. Paul is clearly stating the Argument from Design in Rom 1:20 How did Luther come to this conclusion?

Luther is referring to Rom.1:20 - as is even clearer in the Latin. But he is not inverting Paul. Paul says here that the creation provides evidence for God but that all people misuse & misinterpret it and produce idols. The problem Paul sets out here - at the beginning of his argument extending through 3:18 to show that all people are sinners - is not atheism but idolatry.

Luther believed that people can know from nature that there is a God, but not that they can know anything about who that God is - the divine character, what God wills for us, &c - from nature. & thus any attempt to develop a theology from such "natural knowledge of God" alone turns out to be a false "theology of glory."

I submit that Johnson and other creationist have, in reality, no faith. They can't BELIEVE in God, they have to have "proof". To such an extent that they fabricate such proof.

That may be but I would prefer to put the best construction on things & say that they have poor theology rather than no faith.

Shalom,
George

[shunyadragon]

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The theology of the cross is something broader than a means of interpreting scripture. It means that God is revealed most fully & profoundly in the event of the cross – and by extension in the “crosslike” events, the pattern of death and resurrection, of scripture and of the world. “True theology and recognition of God are in the crucified Christ” as Luther put it.

But to content: One basic difference between our approaches is this. The theology of the cross (as I use the term, in accord with Luther's usage & long Christian tradition) sees the cross of Christ - i.e., the historical crucifixion "under Pontius Pilate" as the fundamental revelation of God. Other phenomena in the world can then be understood as revelatory when viewed in the light of the cross. You, on the other hand (if I understand you correctly) want to see a large class of phenomena, historical & scientific, as revelatory, with the cross of Christ being one such phenomenon. Of course I understand that that makes sense to you as a Bahai, but it isn't Christianity.

How broad? You apparently accept 'extension' to cross-like events as far as 'of the world' to justfy your own 'Theology of the Cross'. Would your statement 'of the world only include the Bible and the Judeo-Christian world.

I don’t know that I can show what was in their mind. I think the concept of inspiration means that God intended some things in scripture that the human writers didn’t have in mind. But we can say the following things about the OT.

I believe your trying justify things from the OT that are just not there.

a) The main parts of its story do have what I referred to earlier as a “crosslike” pattern of death and resurrection. Creatio ex nihilo, the Exodus (which the church has always seen as a type of Christ’s passion and resurrection – cf. Lk.9:31) and the exile & return are the most important examples.

In connection especially with Gen.1:2 Bonhoeffer (Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 3 (Fortress, Minneapolis, 1998), pp.34-35) says:

“[T]he God of creation, of the utter beginning, is the God of the resurrection. The world exists from the beginning in the sign of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Indeed it is because we know the resurrection that we know of God's creation in the beginning, of God's creating out of nothing. The dead Jesus Christ of Good Friday and the resurrected kurioV of Easter Sunday - that is creation out of nothing, creation from the beginning. The fact that Christ was dead did not provide the possibility of his resurrection but its impossibility; it was nothing itself, it was nihil negativum. There is absolutely no transition, no continuum between the dead Christ and the resurrected Christ, but the freedom of God that in the beginning created God's work out of nothing. Were it possible to intensify the nihil negativum even more, we would have to say here, in connection with the resurrection, that with the death of Christ on the Cross the nihil negativum broke its way into God's own being - O great desolation! God, yes God, is dead. [He has in mind here a line from a 17th century German hymn that says Gott selbst liegt tod.] - Yet the one who is the beginning lives, destroys the nothing, and in his resurrection creates the new creation. By his resurrection we know about the creation.”

I believe this is a justified extension based on a broader picture, but itshould not be used to justify 'The Theology of the Cross.

b) We see Christ – and especially his passion & resurrection – in the OT because he tells us that they’re there. Cf. Lk.24:27. Christ puts meaning into the OT that hadn’t been seen before. (Which isn’t of course to say that no OT passages had been seen as messianic before Jesus.)

I realize that God is for the most part hiden, but why hide the very thing that is supposedly the most important central issue of all of God's purpose for his creation and revelation for humanity and from the Christian worldview existence itself?

Here I have to expand on some themes of the theology of the cross.

a) God and God’s actions are characteristically hidden under the form of their absence – for nothing is less like our normal ideas of God than a dead Jewish carpenter on a Roman cross. “Truly, you are a God who hides himself” (Is.45:15). This doesn’t mean that God is absent. As Pascal says (with that verse from Isaiah in mind), everything bears the stamp of “the presence of a God who hides himself.”


b) The kenosis, or emptying of Christ in the Incarnation (Phil.2:7) means divine self-limitation for the sake of creation. If this is indeed characteristic of God’s way of working then we may expect that God will also act kenotically in creation. A number of recent theologians have developed a kenotic view of divine action, according to which God limits what is done in the world to what can be accomplished through lawful natural processes. (See, e.g., John Polkinghorne (ed.), The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (Eerdmans, 2001) & my article “Chiasmic Cosmology and Creation’s Functional Integrity” at http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2001/PSCF3-01Murphy.html .)


If this is the case then we will not “observe” God at work in the world but will be able to understand what happens in the world by scientific investigation of lawful natural processes. Thus creatures are not only “instruments” with which God works but are, in Luther’s phrase, “the masks of God behind which he wishes to remain hidden and do all things.”


This means, among other things, that we should expect to understand the developmental history of the universe and of life scientifically. Since the scientific evidence for cosmic & biological evolution is very strong, we should interpret the Genesis creation accounts in a way that is consistent with the scientific picture. The legitimacy of such an interpretation is shown by the evidence within scripture itself (e.g., the comparison of the 2 accounts) which suggests that they should not both be read as accurate historical or scientific narrative.


This requires us to belief that God, in inspiring these texts, was willing to accommodate the divine message to the scientific and historical views of the biblical writers. Such accomodation shows a condescension which is consistent with the idea of divine kenosis.

To return to the question then: The Genesis accounts (note the plural), as well as other creation texts (Ps.104, Col.1:15-20 &c) are to be read as theological statements about God’s relationship with the world and with humanity.

I’ve already commented on inspiration. I don’t think it means that the Holy Spirit gave the biblical writers scientific information about the world. To put it bluntly, the Spirit didn’t do a very good job if that was the divine intent. That’s one of the things that God gave us brains for – it’s part of the equipment of humanity needed to carry out the commission in Gen.1:26-28 to care for creation.

I don’t like use of the term “inerrancy” because it almost automatically carries the connotation of “errorless narrative of historical events as they really happened.” If we’re to speak of scripture as inerrant, we have to take very seriously the different literary genres in the Bible and the intent of the Holy Spirit.

Accomodation is an interesting concept to deal with conflicts between science and religion. I share your belief that 'inerrancy' is not the answer, but where do stop moving the goal posts. The problem I see is all older religions and churches use this strategy to try and deal with a changing world in many ways to suit their own game plan. Considering the variablity of the understanding of the intent of the Holy Spirit within Christianity, the result is as variable as the number of churches on any given day.


If god gave us brains and free choice to carry out the 'Great Commision', he unfortunately left out the instruction manual. He did not do a very good job giving directions in the OT to the 'Theology of the Cross', leaving only the vaguest possible hints that any such thing exists.

[George Murphy]

Some – though not all – misunderstanding in this thread may be due to the brevity of some of my explanations. I am certainly responsible for being as clear as possible here but those who would like to see my more detailed discussion of science & technology in the context of a theology of the cross might look at my book The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross (Trinity Press International, 2003).

You sounded as though creatio ex nihilo was umambiguous. Just how did the Jews talk about a resurrection before such a thing actually happened? The Messiah was not supposed to resurrect, but conqueor in mortal life.

There was a variety of Jewish “messianic” expectations, not all of which involved a conquering Davidic Messiah. Belief in a general resurrection at the end of history had been established among the Pharisees and others – e.g., Jn.11:24. What nobody apparently expected was the resurrection of a single person in the middle of history. Thus Pannenberg could say “If Jesus has been raised then the end of the world has begun.”

That's a separate concept. Augustine is extending the idea of creatio ex nihilo to the idea of time. However, Genesis 1 implies pre-existing stuff for God to work on, and that stuff apparently does not have a beginning.

That may well have been what was in the mind of the writer of Gen.1 but later Jewish and Christian traditions understood it in terms of belief in creation ex nihilo on the basis of later texts (e.g., II Macc.7:28, Rom.4:17).

This is where you throw in a priori assumptions as tho they are fact. You say "Exodus reaches its full expression only in the resurrection of Christ" as tho that is a fact. It's not. I question the statement. Exodus is an expresssion complete unto itself: creation of

Israel and a covenant with the Hebrews as God's Chosen People. Now, I agree that Israel knew God as Creator from the creation of Israel and Genesis 1 can legitimately be viewed as a retrodiction of that creation to having God create the entire universe (again, see Bernhard Anderson). Now, I can see you saying that [b[salvation [/b] reached its full expression in the resurrection, but not "Exodus".

What you call my “a priori assumption” is the claim that the OT is to be read in light of the New, and in particular in light of the cross-resurrection event. I make no secret of that & no apology for it. There is nothing especially novel about the idea.

In particular, the belief that the Exodus was in an important sense incomplete with the historical event itself is expressed in, e.g., Heb.3:7 – 4:11. It is the basis of all the Passover – Exodus language that has been used to described the significance of the death & resurrection of Christ from the NT itself (“Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us”) to the liturgy of the Easter Vigil today.

That argument isn't legitimate in this context. It's circular reasoning. Look at you -- "mean what they say because they say it". A circle. Theology of the cross, as I understand it, says that the Jesus and the resurrection are integral to the OT. If that is the case, then you are limited to looking ONLY at the OT. Because the NT authors were trying to make Jesus fit the Jewish picture of the Messiah, the possibility exists that they changed/invented details of his life such that those details would fit with what the authors already had in front of them -- the OT. Therefore, the NT is not reliable in relation to your claim.

Where in the world did you get the idea that the theology of the cross is limited to looking ONLY at the OT? It’s a theology of the cross for heaven’s sake!

To say that the OT is to be interpreted in the light of the New, & in particular in light of the cross, doesn’t mean that we’re to ignore the original sense of OT texts. But it means that there may be more meaning in those texts than what the original writers intended. Hos.11:1 refers to Jesus even though Hosea was talking about the historical Exodus because Matthew (inspired by the Spirit of Christ) says it does. That doesn’t mean that Hosea was wrong, but just that the text means more than he realized. There is what used to be called the sensus plenior of scriptural texts.

Nor does this mean, as you seem to think, a “proof” of the truth of OT prophecies by their fulfillment in the NT. There is no circularity here but, if you will, a helical argument. The OT expresses hopes & promises which the NT claims to be fulfilled in Jesus. & OT texts then have fuller meaning when viewed in the light of Christ.

Nor does this mean that the NT writers didn’t deliberately use OT ideas to tell the story of Jesus. Maybe (as a lot of scholars would argue) Jesus wasn’t actually born in Bethlehem, but the NT texts that speak of his birth there are a way of saying that he fulfills the expectation of the Davidic Messiah found, e.g., in Mic.5:2.

Accomodation does not = limitation. An accomodation is doing something you are not required to do. A limitation is something imposed and you are required to adhere to it. The limited human vocabulary is a limitation for God because He cannot get around it. Just like the Uncertainty Principle is a limitation that keeps God from being omniscient WITHIN the universe because there is no way around it.

The kenotic understanding of divine action associated with the theology of the cross says that while God could act arbitrarily within the world, performing miracles that are beyond the capacity of natural processes, he doesn’t (or at least does very seldom.) This isn’t because of an intrinsic limitation of God’s power (as in process theology) but because of God’s voluntary self-limitation. The distinction is essentially the scholastic one between God’s absolute & God’s ordained power. Thus there is no distinction between “accommodation” (as you define it) and self-limitation.

In the same way, God could have miraculously given some people 3000 years ago a crash course in big bang cosmology, circumventing the normal historical development of science. & again he didn’t.

The uncertainty principle isn’t a limitation on God’s ability to know all things because simultaneous position & momentum of a particle isn’t a real “thing.” Position & momentum are operators, not ordinary numbers, & don’t commute so a particle can’t be in an eigenstate of both at the same time. This is not any more a limit on God’s omniscience than God’s inability to know the color of truth.

Even from theory, because theory is always tested in the lab. Lakatos has a good point that major theories have central statements that are not generally questioned and a host of subsidiary statements that can easily be dropped or modified without challenging the central statement. However, it is clear in history that major theories are falsified by data, and not that "research programs" change due to sociological forces. Special creation was falsified, for instance. So was Flood geology. Often it is the people advocating the research program who find the data to falsify it.

I submit that you like Lakatos because it accurately reflects RELIGION. Christianity has core statements that CANNOT be challenged but then a host of statements -- transubstantiation, grace, observance of holidays, etc -- that can be changed. Also, new data doesn't falsify the core statements. Joseph Smith has new revelations, but do Christians all convert and admit that Christianity needs serious modification? Jesus resurrects, but do all the Jews admit that Judaism is seriously flawed and they all become Christians? They don't abandon their research program, even tho you might say that program is not progressing.

OTOH, Adam Sedgwick, William Buckland, Charles Lyell, and others find new data that falsifies the Flood. ALL geologists abandon Flood geology in the 19th century. Watson and Crick crack the DNA helix, and ALL biologists acknowledge that DNA is the hereditary material and abandon other research programs.

I submit that you shouldn’t try to guess why I believe what I do. As a theoretical physicist with some experience in the development of theories & a decent knowledge of the history of science, I think Lakatos' description of the way science works is pretty accurate. (I do not, however, mean that he provides a recipe that scientists have to follow.) The development of scientific research programs is influenced by sociological factors but is driven primarily by scientific observation & theorizing.

Your arguments about special creation & flood geology are wrong, as witnessed by the fact that there are people who are still pursuing such programs. They maintain their hard cores by concocting more & more artificial & far-fetched protective belts. In fact, they provide excellent examples of degenerating research programs – ones that predict no novel facts but must continually modify their protective belts to account for new data. & in fact so-called creation scientists can always fall back on the ultimate protective belt, “apparent age.” This is theologically preposterous but cannot be disproved scientifically. (To all who read this: Please, please, do not take any of my statements here out of context & try to portray me as a supporter in any degree at all of YECism &/or flood geology!)


Shalom,
George

[George Murphy]

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How broad? You apparently accept 'extension' to cross-like events as far as 'of the world' to justfy your own 'Theology of the Cross'. Would your statement 'of the world only include the Bible and the Judeo-Christian world.

I believe your trying justify things from the OT that are just not there.

I am not trying to "justify" the theology of the cross but to show how it enables one to make sense of scripture & our knowledge of the world. & by "the world" I mean the real physical universe, including evolution. That's what I meant by the title of the book to which I referred at the beginning of the previous post.

I believe this is a justified extension based on a broader picture, but itshould not be used to justify 'The Theology of the Cross.

[color=black]"Justifying" the theology of the cross is a poor way to put it. A theology or a scientific theory gains credibility if it enables us to make sense of a larger & larger class of phenomena. The fact that the theology of the cross provides a way of giving a unified interpretation of the OT & NT, as well as broader aspects of human experience & scientific knowledge counts in its favor.

I realize that God is for the most part hiden, but why hide the very thing that is supposedly the most important central issue of all of God's purpose for his creation and revelation for humanity and from the Christian worldview existence itself?

[font=Verdana]God is revealed in the hiddenness of the cross - or, if you prefer, God is hidden as he reveals himself. If you can't stand paradox you won't like the theology of the cross. (In fact what are usuaully called the Luther's "Heidelberg theses" setting out this theology are actually called by Luther "theological paradoxes" (Theologica paradoxa).

Accomodation is an interesting concept to deal with conflicts between science and religion. I share your belief that 'inerrancy' is not the answer, but where do stop moving the goal posts. The problem I see is all older religions and churches use this strategy to try and deal with a changing world in many ways to suit their own game plan. Considering the variablity of the understanding of the intent of the Holy Spirit within Christianity, the result is as variable as the number of churches on any given day.

Accomodation can just be a smokescreen for people to cover their retreats when their traditional interpretations of texts become untenable. The value of the theology of the cross in this context is that it suggests at the start that we ought to find God limited his communication in this way.

If god gave us brains and free choice to carry out the 'Great Commision', he unfortunately left out the instruction manual. He did not do a very good job giving directions in the OT to the 'Theology of the Cross', leaving only the vaguest possible hints that any such thing exists.

I wouldn't agree that the OT is completely vague about this but it's true that we only get a clear understanding of the theology of the cross from the Christ event to which the NT bears witness.

Shalom,
George