Digital Faith

Genesis 1: Theories of Creation

In the middle part of The Lost World of Genesis One, Walton details his theory of the cosmos as God's temple, based on his view of Genesis 1 as an account of functional creation (rather than material creation) and drawing on parallels with other Near Eastern creation accounts. If that idea grabs you, you should read the book. Myself, I know what temples are and I know what the Universe is, and I don't see conflating the two as an advance in my understanding of either. But it is certainly interesting reading.

Genesis 1 Is Functional Creation

In propositions 2 through 6 of The Lost World of Genesis One author John Walton supports his view that Genesis 1 describes how function is bestowed on pre-existing matter. Obviously, the view he is opposing is the orthodox view that Creation is describing the creation of matter out of nothing or ex nihilo. LDS readers won't have a problem with this part of the argument, which tracks the LDS view of Creation quite comfortably.

Genesis 1 Is Ancient Cosmology

That's the first of 18 propositions discussed in John Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One (hat tip: Ben S.). He continues that Genesis "does not attempt to describe cosmology in modern terms or address modern questions. ... [The Israelites] did not know that stars were suns; they did not know that the earth was spherical and moving through space; they did not know that the sun was much further away than the moon, or even further than the birds flying in the air."

Walton also reminds us that "there is no concept of a 'natural' world in ancient Near Eastern thinking. The dichotomy between natural and supernatural is a relatively recent one." That certainly does highlight a problem with the way some today try to turn Genesis into a description of natural events as outlined by modern science: Big Bang, life, human evolution, etc.

N. T. Wright on Paul

In this last of my series of posts on Paul I will do a short review of N. T. Wright's What Saint Paul Really Said (Eerdmans, 1997). It's a fine little book (192 pages; seemed shorter) that, along with Sanders' Paul: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2001), will give any LDS student of Paul a quick introduction to the current scholarship. After reading both books, my quick summary, with slight exaggeration, is:

1. To understand Christianity, one must understand Paul.
2. No one understands Paul.

A Revolutionary Paul

Continuing with this series of posts on Paul, here's what N. T. Wright (in What Saint Paul Really Said) says about E. P. Sanders:

It is a measure of Sanders' achievement that Pauline scholars around the world now refer casually to "the Sanders revolution." ... [T]here is no denying that he has towered over the last quarter of the century much as Schweitzer and Bultmann did over the first half.

I don't have Sanders' major work Paul and Palestinian Judaism, but I do have Sanders' short book Paul: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2001) which summarizes his views on Paul. What did Sanders say that now makes earlier views of Paul seem so dated?

Reading Paul's Letters

My last post was titled "A Mormon View of Paul." This post is more about the view of Paul that comes from reading Paul's own letters. It is easy to read Paul's letters through the lens of the gospels (which were written decades later), Orthodox Christianity (which emerged centuries later), Protestant scholarship (millennia later), and Mormonism (a fairly recent development). It requires real effort to bracket these later developments in order to try to understand Paul on his own terms. [Whether you agree with Paul as understood on his own terms is another matter, of course.]

A Mormon View of Paul

Despite his central role in the New Testament — hero of Acts, apostle to the Gentiles, author of Romans, Galatians, and other letters — Paul presents a number of questions and problems for any serious student or scholar of the New Testament. What is the LDS view of Paul? Is there even an LDS view of Paul? Peter, James, and John appear prominently in LDS scripture and history, but Paul played no apparent role in the Restoration. Why not?

Bible and Authority

I've been renting N. T. Wright's The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture (HarperCollins, 2005) from my local library for the last few days. [It starts out as borrowing, but when the book starts collecting fines but you choose to keep it and finish it anyway, then it's a rental.] Wright's discussion is a lot more interesting in light of a post I did last week, "Bible, Church, and Mystic: for those in cells 4 and 5 (Bible-type churches that ascribe transcendent or rational authority to the Bible), explaining how texts actually confer authority is a critical discussion.

Apocrypha

As the LDS curriculum shifts from the Old Testament to the New Testament, there's a gap of five centuries between the post-Exile situation depicted in Ezra and Nehemiah and the New Testament writings of the first century. The Bible doesn't do much to fill that gap — at least the LDS Bible and others that omit the Apocrypha. I'm going to summarize the entry "Apocrypha" in the Oxford Dictionary of the Bible, then add a few comments about the LDS view of the Apocrypha and other non-canonical writings, including D&C 91.