Let me give you an example of why I so often find myself at odds with contemporary evangelicalism. Today, I was in church listening to a visiting preacher. This preacher rightly stressed the daily pastoral and devotional endeavours of the church as it seeks to “come to the unity of faith” and “the stature of the fullness of Christ” – a work of creation if there ever was one, as the church moves incrementally toward the goal, metaphorically speaking, of a “full grown man”. In short we find ourselves to be agents of Divine labour inside an act of creation. Our first person experience of this work is of a process of great complexity and effort. Words like progress, process, gradualism, and change readily describe this act of social creation, a project composed of a myriad steps forward (and sometimes backward).
And yet so often when these evangelical preachers talk about the act of Genesis Creation they revert to a magical paradigm. Here God is portrayed not as a workmen but a magician whose mere words, like magic spells, bring about Creation. “God”, you will hear them say, “Speaks things into existence at a mere word”, and the example sometimes given is that of Genesis 1:16 where it says “He also made the stars”. This verse is interpreted to mean that God is so powerful that He just "spoke the stars into existence" in an offhand way. Rubbish. The Genesis 1 creation account is of a phased incremental work, of which the Bible uses an umbrella Hebrew word related to our expression “to make”. This same word is also used of created entities within the Creation account, as for example when it says, “He also made the stars”. Hence it is likely that the making of the stars was itself a phased process. In short Creation was a recursive activity that breaks down into finer and finer detail as you zoom in on it. God’s commands, like some highly complex computer algorithm, have detail and sub-detail - they are not magic
Is this just a theoretical nuance? That, I doubt. The visiting preacher may have a different take on Genesis 1 to myself - fair enough, Christains can agree to disagree. But look at how the preacher was using his view of Genesis 1. To him the God of Spells who has the power to “just talk things into existence” was evidence of “how great God is”. Presumably then, the logic of this position demands that a person such as myself who doesn’t accept this illustration has an impoverished view of God’s greatness? Is the next logical step to then use this view to sort out the spiritual elite from the goats and to thereby partition the Church?
And yet so often when these evangelical preachers talk about the act of Genesis Creation they revert to a magical paradigm. Here God is portrayed not as a workmen but a magician whose mere words, like magic spells, bring about Creation. “God”, you will hear them say, “Speaks things into existence at a mere word”, and the example sometimes given is that of Genesis 1:16 where it says “He also made the stars”. This verse is interpreted to mean that God is so powerful that He just "spoke the stars into existence" in an offhand way. Rubbish. The Genesis 1 creation account is of a phased incremental work, of which the Bible uses an umbrella Hebrew word related to our expression “to make”. This same word is also used of created entities within the Creation account, as for example when it says, “He also made the stars”. Hence it is likely that the making of the stars was itself a phased process. In short Creation was a recursive activity that breaks down into finer and finer detail as you zoom in on it. God’s commands, like some highly complex computer algorithm, have detail and sub-detail - they are not magic
Is this just a theoretical nuance? That, I doubt. The visiting preacher may have a different take on Genesis 1 to myself - fair enough, Christains can agree to disagree. But look at how the preacher was using his view of Genesis 1. To him the God of Spells who has the power to “just talk things into existence” was evidence of “how great God is”. Presumably then, the logic of this position demands that a person such as myself who doesn’t accept this illustration has an impoverished view of God’s greatness? Is the next logical step to then use this view to sort out the spiritual elite from the goats and to thereby partition the Church?
