Back from the Dead…and Announcing a New Book

No posts for three years? Um…in my defense, I was teaching Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, Biblical Hebrew, living, doing family, and writing a book, now published with Eerdmans, Recruiting the Ancients for the Creation Debate. It took way too long and now it’s complete and available here.

What is it trying to do? Let me compare it to my only/other book, The Days of Creation (now Brill, 2012). The latter book was a tidied-up version of my doctoral thesis with the University of Queensland, which surveyed Christian interpretation of the creation week of Genesis 1 in the Bible from pre-Christian through apostolic church history and beyond all the way down to the controversial British publication Essays and Reviews (1860). That was a treatment looking from the past forward and taking note not just of high-profile, well-remembered interpretive examples but of others at risk of being lost from consciousness, such as gnostic or esoteric interpretations. It tended towards over-compression of individual cases in the quest to be rather comprehensive. Some lines of interpretation, such as post-Mohammed Syrian and Persian examples, had to be sacrificed to permit completion within reasonable limits.

This is not the same book. It starts from modern times and looks back, and examples are included where they represent significant authorities utilized to buttress present-day positions on the meaning of biblical creation, once again with a focus on the creation week. Little-known or lost examples are not the focus this time, but rather those of acknowledged standing: the famous names, the Augustines and Basils and Aquinases and Calvins. Those chosen for inclusion are treated much more deeply, beginning with how they have been utilized in current debate. Then they are analyzed in their ancient context, their creation position is clarified, and their present use is critiqued for the quality of its use of history. I interpret ‘ancient’ rather broadly, very broadly, but restrict my coverage to those figures regarded as authoritative Christian interpreters by the debaters themselves, regardless of how justified that regard might seem. This means that coverage, in time, spans the liminal, pre-Christian yet influential figure of Philo Judaeus up to the eighteenth-century John Wesley, after which we are in the realm of modern commentary.

What is the driving point of this book? It is a problem with study of such ‘ancients’ that is described in this way by Donald Fairbairn, in a quote I reproduce in the book:

Very little modern study of patristic exegesis by biblical scholars and theologians actually starts with…a humble, teachable attitude. Most such scholarship is simply an attempt to give historical authority to our own methods.

Donald Fairbairn, “Patristic Exegesis and Theology: The Cart and the Horse,” Westminster Theological Journal 69, no. 1 (2007): 5-6.

This is the historiographic fallacy that I critique in this book with reference especially to the creation week, and extending it beyond patristic exegesis to later figures also suffering such anachronistic recruitment to a contemporary cause, notably a literal or else a figurative understanding of the creation week. The ‘ancients’ do have relevant things to say about this interpretive question, but until we return to them with questions rather than a self-confirmation agenda, we will not properly perceive them. As I assert in the book (concluding chapter 10):

“Until we read ancient writers with motivations that transcend the quest for self-confirmation, our understanding of them will always be shallow and deficient.”

If you are interested in important ancient precedents for literal or figurative interpretations of biblical creation, modern-day creation debates overall, or this phenomenon of recruiting ancient authorities in general, you should enjoy this book. I feel sure you’ll find some interesting path to explore.

Andrew B.

Time for a Quickie: The Ox and Ass of Christmas

Just have to wake my somnolent blog from its slumber to mention this, a firstfruits offering from John F. A. Sawyer’s Isaiah through the Centuries (Wiley Blackwell, 2018). Have you ever noticed that the Gospel nativity stories mention no ox or ass/donkey in connection with the birth of Jesus? This is one of those Christmas traditions that’s so ingrained you can’t quite believe it isn’t actually there. So where does it come from?

Sawyer points out the presence of this benevolently beastly pair in Christmas carols, Renaissance art (Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity, c. 1500) and medieval traditions, right back to “the eighth-century apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew” (ah yes, I know it well!), but Sawyer finally traces them back to a Christian interpretation of the opening verses of the ‘fifth Gospel’, a name for Isaiah whose contemporary currency (with me, at least) is thanks in some degree to Sawyer’s own book of twenty years ago, The Fifth Gospel (for the detail, see Isaiah through the Centuries, 11–13). This is Isaiah 1:3 (NIV):

The ox knows its master,
the donkey its owner’s manger,
but Israel does not know,
my people do not understand.

‘Manger’ in this translation is apt; combine this verse with Jesus’ post-natal bedding arrangements, and you have stock animals outshining their human contemporaries in their recognition of their true master. As you might imagine, every possible anti- and pro-Semitic battle can be fought right over these words, but I thought I’d put this out there as a fascinating tidbit from reception history that demonstrates how we don’t simply formulate our sense of a text from our own direct reading alone, but read in community across space and time.

By the way, I still like it how many donkeys, like the one living at our old favourite holiday camping spot in Australia’s New England region, have a cross displayed across their shoulders, as if for pure symbolic value alone.

The Digital Document Detective Episode 2: Ancient and Medieval Backgrounds

You can find many important ancient, medieval, Renaissance/Reformation and Modern primary documents online. The scene is changing all the time, and sometimes documents you could find earlier disappear. But more often the trend is towards greater availability, and other parties such as European libraries and universities are catching up to Google in providing materials online. Top-notch critical editions and recent scholarly publications are the two categories of documents usually not available online except behind paywalls. Older materials, private translations, book previews, online journals…there is still much that is useful that can be found online for free. Here is merely a sample list, stemming from things I was looking for in my own research:

Presentation: The Position of Reception History in Biblical Studies

I presented this presentation and paper to the Australian group, the Fellowship of Biblical Studies, in Melbourne, 26/09/16. It concerns both the value & risks of reception history for biblical studies and consideration of the similarity and differences in practice between reception history (Wirkungsgechichte) and history of interpretation (Auslegungsgeschichte), which are both studies of how biblical texts (and others, as easily) have been interpreted and had influence through time. The former is broader than the latter in a range of ways, and I found some tensions between the practice of the two. The following demonstrates these ideas mostly in diagrams with a little text and some explanatory notes, and see the following Word document also.

This is the Word document, merely in dot-point form, rather than a proper prose piece, but it may fill in some gaps:

PowerPoint Presentation: Athens & Jerusalem: Science-and-Religion Strategies among Interpreters of Genesis in the Modern Era

This is a talk I am due to deliver to ISCAST (Institute for the Study of Christianity in an Age of Science and Technology) at the University of NSW tomorrow night, 4/6/15. It is based on my research into interpretations of Genesis 1 down through time, with an emphasis this time on unpacking the way certain interpreters treated the relationship between scientific knowledge and Christian teaching.

Please note that the formatting of the graphics is a bit corrupted when viewed as an online PowerPoint, but it displays fine when downloaded. View with the notes showing to see my sources. If you prefer, try the PDF version:

Micro Book Review – Sam Berry’s Lion Handbook of Science and Christianity

Berry, R. J. (ed.). The Lion Handbook of Science and Christianity (1st ed ed.; Oxford : Chicago: Lion Hudson ; Distributed by Trafalgar Square Pub, 2012).

I have recently given a thorough browse to this attractive work from our college (Melbourne School of Theology) shelves. Let me tame my prolix (verbose (wordy)) ways and give you a few pros and cons:

Pros

• Really well presented, with lots of colour, diagrams, pictures, great layout, visual differentiation to make it easy to face each page. Books have come a long way in user-friendliness in the last century! If only my book looked like this!
• Reasonably bite-size portions, with many 1- and 2-page treatments of science and religion issues.
• A great coverage of such issues, offering a really useful overview of what might be debated under the heading of science and religion.
• Scientifically well-informed, as far as I am qualified to tell.
• Currency – it’s right up to date.
• Evangelical Christian standpoint. (If you’re not an evangelical Christian, you might put this under ‘Cons’, but I still encourage you to check it out.)

Cons

• Naturally, there is a sacrifice in depth where there is gain in breadth of coverage. So this is really an introductory volume, designed I think for the college student as an introductory science and religion textbook (but what a textbook!) or for the interested layperson.
• We might wish for a deeper and more determinate handling of texts like Genesis 1 (though see pp. 152-153).

The Wrap

• This makes a great starting point for your research into science and religion. It will orient you to the issues and get you pointed in the right direct. With lots of eye candy along the way.
• I would recommend following up with some deeper reading on the issues of concern to you. There is a good-length list of further reading in the back of the book, so you won’t be short of ideas.

Days of Creation Book Launch Presentation – MST Graduation 1 Dec 2014

Time is short in graduation ceremonies. Here is what I would say about The Days of Creation, if time permitted. What can we say about Genesis chapter 1?

Genesis 1 existed in relative obscurity when the Christian church was born, though it was far from being unknown, as passages like these remind us:

For God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ. (2 Cor. 4:6 Holman Christian Standard Bible)

As centuries passed, Genesis 1 became the focus of increasing interest, including becoming the subject of a burst of preaching and commentary by figures such as Basil the Great and Augustine around 400 AD/CE. Soon it provided the dominant paradigm for Christian explanation of the origin and nature of the physical world (and a lot of other things!).

This remained true throughout the Middle Ages and through the Reformation era. But eventually a combination of philosophical currents old and new and a weakening of traditional authority structures began to undermine this intellectual dominance. It began to break down in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth, studies of nature that once would have been carried out with reference to Genesis became independent from it.

The causes for this sombre trend are manifold, and are explored somewhat in the book. In part they have to do with a burgeoning sense of the age of the earth from the late 1600s onward – the increasingly widespread belief that the earth, like humanity, had a history whose relics could be studied, and that in fact the earth’s story significantly pre-dated the human story. One term for this is the ‘discovery of time’, and attitudes to the days of the creation week, in simplified form, can be plotted to show a trend from a time when six literal days was felt to be too long of a time for God to create (Augustine and Origen) to a time when schemes for creation days that were figuratively extended to stand for years or even ages began to be proposed.

Learning of this trend often prompts Christians to wonder, “How then should I regard Genesis 1 when I read it now?” In my experience, the meaning of Genesis 1:1-2:3 (as well as that of Genesis 2:4-25) has been clarified by the perspective of ‘discourse analysis’, which simply means paying attention to the literary shape of the narrative and the language signals that communicate to us how the story is moving forward. Reading Genesis 1 with this awareness shows that when creation begins, three things are lacking that prevent a world as the Old Testament would perceive it from existing.

What is missing in Gen. 1:2, which is needed to make a world, is 1) form or distinction, clear zones in which various life forms could exist; 2) fullness, i.e. living populations, inhabitants, including humans; 3) light. Light is fittingly the first thing provided, after which increasing distinctions provide places to live, and then beings are created to live in those spaces. If you’re familiar with the scientific concept of entropy or the ‘heat death’ of the universe, where temperature (energy) and other distinctions are gradually ironed out until there is nothing in any meaningful sense, creation in Genesis 1 is exactly the opposite! Creation reaches its highest distinction with the arrival of humans, the image-bearers, on Day 6.

Such an understanding works very well for following the story of human creation in Gen. 2:4-25 also.

I would like to say, then, that Genesis 1 is not only a God-inspired biblical text, but is extraordinarily versatile, given that it stems from an ancient culture in what from our perspective is an ancient world. What other creation story thousands of years old survives as unscathed as the creation week of Genesis 1? What other example presents God’s authorship of all categories of the known world while importing so little of an obsolete cosmology, while avoiding mythology, which is so prone to obsolescence? What is simpler and more practical than to categorize life by its medium, air, water and earth?

Where we do sometimes get into trouble sometimes, I believe, is when we read Genesis as if it was written in our time, or if that’s implying too much ignorance, as if it was written just for us, just for our time in history. We sometimes ask it to make perfect sense in the twenty-first century, to sound utterly modern. This is actually selfish; it is in effect to ask that it make little or no sense to the people of God in eras other than our own, or even people in non-Western cultures in our own time. It is an ancient text, and it shows this in various ways, not least in the way it speaks about the ‘expanse’ (raqia) and the waters above it. But in its God-givenness it transcends its ancient birth in a unique way, retaining its ability to proclaim God’s authorship of and sovereignty over physical and human creation to people of every era.

The fact that we forget how ancient it is may be a sign of just how well it succeeds at this purpose.

 

Days of Creation Book Now Available

Received the first box of print copies this week, and I’ve checked and found that the title is available for purchase:

http://www.eisenbrauns.com/item/BRODAYSOF

Here’s a better view, though I enjoyed the first one, too:

Here’s the rider: it only covers up to around 1860! (Perhaps I should have put that on the cover!) Stay tuned for the sequel. I hope you’re in good health…it’s gonna take some time!

GENESIS AND THE REAL WORLD: THE BENEFIT OF LOOKING BACK

It is clear to me as I teach Old Testament each week that many present-day Christian readers of Genesis still want to know how it interfaces with the sciences.  Some will be happy simply to ignore the sciences, while others know little about them, and still others think science and the Bible speak unrelated languages and have nothing to do with one another.  But as soon as I try to skirt the tricky issues and concentrate purely on the theology of Genesis, or its literary features, I am soon reminded that the burning question for at least some students is, “How am I to regard evolution?”, or, “What do the days of Genesis mean?”

These questions are not new.  The first has been firmly on the agenda for two centuries, and the second has been asked and studied from various standpoints throughout Christian history.  I am firmly convinced that a look into the history of attempts to bring the ‘real world’ (as perceived at the time) and Genesis to terms will bring insights into present attempts to do the same.  This conviction motivated my personal research into the history of Christian interpretation of the creation week of Genesis 1:1-2:3.[1]

This study has turned out to be a kind of deep-trench archaeological investigation into the history of Christian thought – rather narrow sideways, but very deep.  Most of the leading thinkers of Christian history, amongst their other output, wrote or said something about Genesis 1, and often at great length – up to 800+ pages on this single chapter of the Bible![2]

It is revealing to discover that the most popular schemes of reconciling the Genesis creation week with ‘common knowledge’ about the world’s origin have deep roots.  The Gap Theory or Ruin-Restitution Hypothesis, which posits a vast and geologically eventful period of ancient time after creation but prior to the creation week, lying concealed within the rather indefinite language of Gen. 1:2, is often traced back to a Scot called Thomas Chalmers, speaking in the early 1800s.  In fact, it was a well-recognized option on the continent after about 1750, as related to geological eras, and in a more vague form, as a lifeless early phase of earth history, has roots all the way back past the Renaissance and to the patristic period.

The Day-Age or Long Creation Day concept, too, while it had its heyday around the 1850s and remains a well-recognized method of reconciling Genesis and geology today, is quite identifiable shortly after 1750, is being mooted in more limited forms before 1700, and finds antecedents in the idealist approach to the Genesis days of the Cambridge Platonists in the mid-1600s and prior…although the often-cited precedent in Augustine is greatly overstated.  One interesting factor is that this strategy, which today represents a realist stance regarding the physical world, has its taproot in Platonist, idealist approaches to the creation week.  On the other hand, a second ancestry lies in the very early trend of interpreting the creation week as a prophecy of a 7×1000 year sacred world history.

Idealist approaches to the Genesis days, which arguably include Augustine’s final, ‘literal meaning of Genesis’, ultimately find expression today also in the Framework Hypothesis/Analogical Days stance on the creation week, sometimes with quite a Platonist flavour (as in Meredith Kline’s thought)[3] and sometimes without.  As a final example, not all Young Earth Creationists, taking the creation week literally and associating it with a biblical chronology that leads back from datable ancient events in an unbroken chain to creation itself, would realize that one of the strongest defences of this position was published in the 1850s by Philip Gosse in Omphalos,[4] yet failed to persuade the mainstream scientific world.

It’s a fascinating history, and the more it is studied, the more profoundly relevant it turns out to be.  The history of interpretation of the creation week in Genesis emerges as a crucial case study in Christian thought, the history of western thought, and even the rise of modern science, for interpretation of Genesis was the midwife that oversaw its gestation and birth, though its genetics are partly pagan and classical.

Genesis’ version of creation dominated Western thought for most of the last 2,000 years.  It’s a career that deserves to be narrated.

 

Andrew Brown

June 2014

 

References

Brown, Andrew J. The Days of Creation: A History of Christian Interpretation of Genesis 1:1–2:3. Blandford Forum: Deo Publishing, forthcoming.  https://www.eisenbrauns.com/ECOM/_43L1FFT2V.HTM

Gosse, Philip. Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot. London: John Van Voorst, 1857.  http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39910

Kline, Meredith G. “Space and Time in the Genesis Cosmogony.” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 48, no. 1 (1996): 2-15.

Mersenne, Marine. Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim, cum accurata textus explicatione. Reprint of 1916. Edited by. ed. Vol. Paris: sumptibus Sebastiani Cramoisy, 1623.

 

[1] Brown, The Days of Creation: A History of Christian Interpretation of Genesis 1:1–2:3 (Blandford Forum: Deo Publishing, forthcoming).

[2] Specifically Mersenne, Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim, cum accurata textus explicatione (Paris: sumptibus Sebastiani Cramoisy, 1623).

[3] Kline, “Space and Time in the Genesis Cosmogony,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 48, no. 1 (1996): 2–15.

[4] Gosse, Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot (London: John Van Voorst, 1857).

Days of Creation Book Only Days Away

More thoughts about Genesis 1 shortly, but just discovered a happy sight: the listing of my forthcoming book on the Eisenbrauns website:

The Days of Creation
A History of Christian Interpretation of Genesis 1:1-2:3
History of Biblical Interpretation – HBI 4
by Andrew J. Brown
Deo Publishing, Forthcoming, spring 2014
English
Paper
ISBN: 9781905679270
Your Price: $37.95
https://www.eisenbrauns.com

I know it’s real, because I just sent the index off this afternoon, the last thing needed.  Please use it, it was a lot of work!

Some tasters to come…