Is That Biblical?

First, read this:

http://www.missionfrontiers.org/issue/article/god-of-the-thai

I live in Thailand working with The Charis Project. So I am part of some of the missionary discussions around this article and the parallel discussions about different evangelism strategies. There has been some profound backlash in some circles. Accusations of syncretism, departure from Biblical truth, etc. Here is one comment:

Very disappointing read!!!! The author's mindset would be comparable to saying the reason all the Ninevites repented is because Jonah crafted his message to fit the culture of Ninevah. Come on, I am all for contextualization but let's think a little more Biblically and Theo-centric.

Now there are many problems with this comment but I am not about to address them here. I cite it here because it is demonstrative of a particular method of assessment that I disagree with.

From the discussions I have seen, I believe that the commenter is saying that the evangelism method that the author of the article is advocating is not Bible-centered because it is not centered on the Bible as the ultimate truth to which all other cultures are opposed and so Christianity must be preached using only explicitly Bible words and images and cultural practices. Moreover, it seems that he does this entirely neglecting that the Bible is a highly encultured collection of books and that it was not written in English or to English idiom and that he has already reenculturated it from it's original context into a Protestant and western reading.

It seems to me that the Bible gives precedent for exactly the sort of evangelism the article speaks of. This is what Paul did in Athens. The difference appears to be that where Paul’s attempt failed the same style of evangelism is succeeding in Thailand. Moreover I believe that evangelism is about growing the body of Christ rather than forming people after he image of Western Christendom.

To me, a far more important point is the way we assess the method of evangelism advocated by the author of the article.

I advocate giving a priority to a reading of scripture whereby we learn from the methodologies recorded as spirit led. This means that we would look to scripture to get a grip on how those who it records as being led by the Spirit went about coming to the conclusions they came to and then treat it as a training manual for us to learn the same methodologies.

With this in mind we should look at the first council of Jerusalem recorded in Acts as a case study. Here we have in scripture a record of Spirit led assessment of mission. The issue at hand was fundamental to the young Church’s doctrine of salvation: could Gentiles be included in Jesus’ reconstitution of Israel in himself as Gentiles or did they have to become Jews in order to be included? Remember, at this time there were no Christians. The followers of Jesus were a Jewish sect and to them the following of Jesus and his whole reconstitution of Israel project was strictly a Jewish happening. And then Peter goes and preaches to Cornelius’ household. And the Spirit comes. On Gentiles. While they were still Gentiles. This presented a problem since to them this Jesus thing was Jewish. Thus the council. So what did they do? They listened to the testimony of a credible witness about the event. From this they concluded that since the Spirit came on Gentiles the same as the Spirit came on Jews God didn’t seem to hold the same doctrine that they did. Because of this they shifted their doctrine and recognized that Gentiles could very well be members of Jesus as Gentiles. Now this is very important. In technical terms they let experiential pneumatology take precedence over soteriology. The observation of the outbreaking of the Kingdom of God trumped their doctrine of salvation.

This scriptural case study seems to me to directly bear on the testimony of the author of this article. To be in keeping with apostolic methodology we should look at the testimony and be ready to have our preconceived doctrines of how God is supposed to work trumped by the outbreaking of the Kingdom. And, we in fact find exactly this outbreaking in the Thai communities the author speaks of. Our Biblical response then is to recognize the effectiveness of the method of evangelism as taking ground against the futility and chaos of this world and to accept these Thai people following Jesus in their Thai way as our brothers and sisters in Jesus.

An admittedly not so charitable question that comes up in my mind is whether those who oppose the evangelism witnessed to in the article have a sufficient working knowledge of the Spirit of the living God to be able to recognize him when he shows up where they did not expect to see him?

As a post script, I wonder how this apostolic methodology would work in the debate over the place of LGBT folks in the Kingdom? But, I will leave that question to those of you for whom this is already an active discussion.

(Side point on the article: in discussion with some of my Thai pastor friends it appears that the historical background that the author cites as the basis of the difficulty really isn't an issue as even though they are highly educated they knew nothing about that religious/political conflict. From their perspective that historical background is a non-issue.)

On My Father's Shoulders

I grew up saturated in the belief that the ultimate source of the universe is actively loving and that our highest notions of love reflect that ultimate source*. That is to say that God really loves us perfectly and his love is recognizable to us through our experience of it's reflection. Even more simply: God loves us completely in a way that makes sense to us.

My father did not grow up in this. Rather, he has had to fight for it. This fight has been most clear in his longstanding and often controversial teaching on the grace of God, speaking in defense of it for thousands of hours, all his writings, outworkings of defending the grace of God. The grace of God needs defending because it is and has been for much of history under attack.

To be more accurate, the grace of God does not need defense. It is quite secure in itself. Rather people are in need of being released from bondage to false notions of God that see him as vindictive, judgmental, irritable, distant, etc.

My father has worked at this for most of his life, pulling and pulling  because he needed the truth he knew to train his own heart. He has needed release from the same bondage he fought for for others. This understanding of God is something he has defended. This understanding of God is where I start. I grew up in this environment, starting with a radical notion of the grace of God, early saturation deeply setting the way I think and feel about the world and my life and my place in both. This deeply rooted understanding that reality has such a bright truth at its core grounds freedom and joy at the foundation of my life and work, but at the same time, not having to work for it, impedes my ability to articulate that very grace to people who do not yet truly know it.

The grace of God is not an "issue" for me. That God really loves us and this world he has created is where I start. The difficulty that arises from this is if other people do not start from the this same place, especially on such a fundamentally vital point, what I say can be very horribly misunderstood. Especially since I talk a lot about our responsibilities and the work we have to do in the world. One could very easily think that I am teaching that we in some way earn, by these works, our position with God. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Nothing I say has anything to do with securing a better position with God. Everything I say is predicated on the foundation that we are all already completely secure in the love and acceptance of God.

We are all fully loved and accepted by God, right now exactly as we are. That is bombproof. That is true whether we feel like it or not. That is just as true for the person across the street and across the ocean as it is for you and me. Jesus has already taken up all of humanity into the embrace of the Trinity. The Spirit is always already present in every place and person, ready to be honored and embraced. The Father has, from the very beginning, chosen each and all of us to be adopted as his true children.

That is my foundation. There is nothing I need to do to "get right with God." There are no hoops I need to jump through, no manual I need to read, no cross I need to nail myself to. All is grace. It is by  the grace of God that I do right and by the grace of God that I sin. My very existence is a gift. I have nothing and yet by the adoption of the Most High everything is mine.

Given the radical depth and power of the grace of God and his complete acceptance of us all the only thing that is left to us is to get down to work. There is nothing for us to earn so we might as well work at life and that more fully. That is where I go. Given the total love and acceptance of our Father lets get to work. We have been given a creation to complete.

I also talk about my father here.

*For a good primer on what I grew up with see: The Gospel Uncensored

Going Hammer-Time On That Last Post

One of my friends requested that I rewrite "Theology Is A Deliverance Ministry" twice so that he can be sure of what I am saying. He is a lit professor so I will obey. I will rewrite in different formats and possibly even genres if only to work my skills.

In this first rewrite I will break it down:

God did not complete the creation.

The creation is yet to a significant degree subject to chaos and futility (formless and void).

God intends that creation be completed.

God created humans to complete the creation.

God truly loves the humans.

God put his life into humans so that they would be able to complete the creation.

Humans disobeyed God.

God forgives the humans for their disobedience.

The humans' disobedience broke them from the life of God.

 Without this life the humans are unable to complete the creation.

God intends that creation be completed.

The world exists as concrete time and space.

The forgiveness of God must come concretely into time and space to take effect in this world.

Jesus is the concrete expression of God's forgiveness in time and space.

As God takes on humanity in Jesus humanity is taken into God.

In the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus God effects his forgiveness on humanity.

The proof of this forgiveness is the return of the life of God into the humans.

Redemption is the action of this forgiveness taking full root in humanity.

Though the forgiveness has been made concrete the redemption is yet to be fulfilled in space and time.

Humans are complex entities.

The overtaking of this complexity by redemption involves the totality of this complexity.

As the redemption overtakes us we progressively become more aware and active in our participation in the reason for which we were created.

Our thoughts and beliefs are part of this complexity.

When our thoughts and beliefs are inconsistent with reality they require energy to maintain.

The greater our thoughts and beliefs diverge from reality the more energy they take to maintain.

Theology and evangelism are means by which our thoughts and beliefs come more into line with reality.

Theology and evangelism deliver us from ideas and beliefs that take up energy to maintain.

As these tools of redemption have their effect our energies are released to be focused on the completion of creation once again in obedience to God by the life of God in us.

We proclaim the good news because Jesus tells us to proclaim the good news.

We proclaim the good news because doing so moves redemption forward in the concrete time and space of this world.

We proclaim the good news so that the whole of humanity that has been taken up into God by the incarnation may become fully self aware as the body of Christ.

We proclaim the good news because the workers are few and the harvest is great, as great as the whole of creation.

Stop, hammer-time.

Theology Is A Deliverance Ministry

Being Christian does not get you into heaven. That is not the point of Christianity. At least it wasn't until Christianity lost it's way and needed a punishment/reward system to compensate for it's waning focus on the centrality of Jesus' work of effecting the forgiveness of God in the concrete history of the world that reinstated humanity as the very presence of God by the indwelling of the Spirit of God and the participating instruments of God's plan to bring the creation to completion (see here) (also, the length of this sentence is a tribute to my partial German heritage).

The work of Jesus is universal in scope for all things are in him.

Yet this complete salvation is incomplete. This universality of salvation is in principle. Just as the forgiveness of God has been an in principle reality from the first instance of disobedience. Though God's forgiveness has always been there it still needed to have its concrete establishment in the actual history of the world for it to take effect in the world. In the same way, the universality of this forgiveness and redemption must work out into the actual dirt and blood of history. Though in the incarnation all of humanity has been drawn into the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus and been opened to the life of the Spirit this reality has yet to actually overcome the futility and chaos that pervade the concrete reality of history.

This points to the purpose of theology and evangelism.

Evangelism is the wider end of theology. Where theology deals with the fine grains, evangelism interacts on the level of large chunks but they are on the same continuum. They are both addressing the actual structure of reality.

If redemption is universal then why theologize or evangelize? If what we think and believe has nothing to do with our ultimate destiny then why concern ourselves with it? If "God Gets Everyone" then what is the point of working hard?

First, because Jesus tells us to proclaim the good news.

Second, because our ultimate destiny was never the issue. The issue has always been the fulfillment of creation, so the objection is really baseless in that it assumes a falsity.

Third, we proclaim the Gospel, we work hard to accurately grasp reality because our purpose is active participation in this plan of God for creation.

If our beliefs are inconsistent or are at odds with reality then we suffer cognitive dissonance. We must exert a tremendous amount of creative mental energy to hold together ideas and beliefs that do not fit.

Now, imagine how much God given creative energy would be freed up if we were delivered from false ideas. Energy that could then be directed toward our actual purpose in this world: our active participation in bringing the universal redemption enacted in principle in Jesus into the concrete blood and dirt of history.

Theology is a deliverance ministry. It releases the the children of God from the demonically onerous futility of screwy ideas.

Evangelism is the process by which the universal body of Christ becomes self-aware.

Shameless Foundations: Part 4-God's Position

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

So God must be pretty pissed off at us for screwing up right? If we listen to much of the tradition that is what we would gather. This tradition does not act out of mean intent. Rather out of a desire to build the glory of God. However, the tradition has taken as its model of glory an understanding that has arisen out of the chaos that we have become subjected to.

Inadvertently, and with the best of intentions, the tradition has portrayed the glory of God as a petulant seven-year-old: "I made this and it is mine, now you messed it up, so I am going to play mean now." As if God is so insecure that he would have a tantrum. As if the Creator of all worries about his rights.

God doesn't need our defense of his glory to feel good about himself.

Remember in Part 1 I mentioned the dangers of turning God into a set of principles and deriving an ideology from those principles? This is a case in point.

The traditional notion of God's glory and what it means to us comes out of a set of supposedly ultimate principles that are supposed to describe the concept of God. First, I see no good reason why God should either have to or even want to conform himself to a set of principles that we have set up as conditions for us to conceptualize him as God. Second, God can do what God wants to do. The Creator of all has no obligation to behave in ways that we set out for him.

So our only really legitimate course of action is to look at what God does to figure out the the way God behaves.

When we look at this we do not see a petulant child. We do not see a God who says, "You messed this up, screw you all."

When we disobeyed and ate from the tree that God had commanded us not to he didn't slam down in a bolt of lightening and beat the crap out of us. He talked to us. He took us seriously enough to ask us what was up (as if he didn't know) almost as though he actually did intend to work through and with us to get his plan accomplished.

He comes into the garden and asks, "Hey, where are you guys?" We were hiding and said so and said that we were hiding because we were ashamed that we were naked. We had not been ashamed before. God knows this and asks "Who told you that you were naked?" And goes on to observe, "Oh, you must have eaten from that tree, why would you do that?" Our response its to start passing the buck of blame. Our primordial understanding of the character of God lacked the revelation of God's care for and committed interest in our well being. I have always wondered, in light of the span of the later story what would have happened if we would have, instead of passing the blame, said, "I screwed up. I disobeyed you. I did what you told me not to do. I should not have done that."* However this is not what happened. We persisted in our resistance.

Now the unfortunate results of our disobedience are not at all out of proportion to that disobedience. God doesn't destroy us. God doesn't beat the ever-loving crap out of us. God didn't impale us and stick red hot pokers in our eyes. God had designed and commissioned us to carry out his plan of bringing this world to completion. To go out and subdue the chaotic and futile earth. We rejected the connection that would have enabled us to carry out that plan. God merely released us into the world to experience for ourselves the chaotic futility that he had designed us to overcome.

He releases us but he does not reject us. Rather than berating us for our stupid insistence on the evils of nakedness he gives us clothes. And he lets us die rather than live forever in our subjection to futility.

We find a similar sort of story with Cain and Abel. And then we go out and multiply and fail to subdue the the chaotic futility. Rather, we wholeheartedly contribute to it. God had made us to complete this world because he wanted it completed and he wanted to do it through us and we were tearing it apart. In frustration and regret God decides to start over. Take it back to before the garden and then decide whether to try again.

But no. He finds a way to keep this plan on track. There is at least one person who is willing to obey him. God says, "I can work with that. We can try to reset to the garden with someone who is willing to obey."

So, Noah and the Flood.

After the reset,  God reminds us that we created us for and recommissions us, but it is different this time, "Be fruitful and multiply; increase abundantly on the earth and multiply on it." There is no subduing. The breath is gone from us. We have not the power to carry out our full purpose. God is just hoping for obedience at this point, but with his finished earth final goal still fully in view he decides that if it gets this bad again he will figure out another way to get his plan done than flooding out the world.

What can we say about God?  He is committed to overcome adversity in order to get his plan accomplished. This plan is for the completion of the world. He created us as central to getting that plan done. He is committed to us and getting us back on track with the ultimate plan. Our place in that plan involves a radically tight bond between us and God. Our disobedience to God endangers that bond.

This is the conclusion of this series. In the next one we will look at how God interacts with us to finally accomplish his grand strategy and get the completed world filled with humans, fully alive and in radical union with him: his very presence in this world.

*This interaction points right back to Part 2. Nudity is not the point. God himself makes the conclusion: "Who told you were naked....you must have eaten from the tree, you have clearly come to your own conclusions as to what is good and what is evil and are obeying that in opposition to obeying me." (Obviously this is an extension of the text, but it is fully warranted and right as well.)  We had set up our own system of morality and were obeying that rather than God. We can obey a system of morality or we can obey God. Not both. This is important. Notice that we were naked before we gained the knowledge of good and evil. It was only when we gained that knowledge that we decided that nakedness was bad. Before we gained that knowledge all we had was "Yes, Father." The very notion of good and evil was meaningless. When the totality of our assessment of action is limited to "Yes, Father" the categories of good and evil have no content. In obeying a system of morality, a law, we are withholding obedience to God and giving it to another.

Go Forth And Conquer

The majority of humanity operates at the level of reptilian stimulus-response, this includes Christians. "There might be danger so we should hide." There is pain in the box so we take our hand out. But this is death.

We stand blinded behind our walls of protection. Walls that we have constructed to give us a sense of security in the open world that we find ourselves in. We build walls so that we can see that we are "in," so that we can touch and handle our "assurance of salvation." Like a medieval city that acts like it were under siege, we get sick and diseased as if the siege were real and we invite any passing army to fill the void around our walls.

Our only assurance of salvation is God's promise of victory. If Jesus is for real and the incarnation true then to participate in Christ is is to participate in the way God wins the victory. The actual redemption of this world involves radical pouring out, aggressive identification, and ultimate commitment. Our survival depends on this

The chaotic evil that pervades this world is not a conceptual problem to be understood but a practical problem to be annihilated. We are engaged in a war of conquest for our inheritance. Our success depends on us constantly engaging. Attack, attack, attack! Shine the light, Shine the light until there is no darkness. Go out and fuck shit up because when we hide in apparent safety we lose.

This is the movement of the Spirit: to bring the Kingdom of God on earth, and those who are of the Spirit live by the movement of the Spirit.

The Father has given the inheritance, the Son has empowered the inheritors to take possession, and by the Spirit we go forth and multiply and subdue the earth, bringing the creation and redemption to completion. And we look like Jesus as we do it.

Thank you DLM for writing this post. You have helped to re-catalyze my understanding of why we do what we do.

Shameless Foundations: Part 3-Things Go Wrong

Part 1
Part 2

So God chose to make this world and put us in this world. God has largely ordered the cosmos out of his primordial lump of chaotic stuff but a significant degree of disorder remains. Into this he decides to carve out a a bit that looks remarkably finished. Into this corner of the world God then sticks creatures that are made out of the stuff of this world and makes them alive by putting his own life into them, making these creatures become his own very presence in this world, not above this world but in this world. He then makes clear why he made these creatures with a great commission: "Go out from this corner, become numerous, and bring this world to completion."

And then we ate a bit of fruit, started blaming each other, and lost the ability to do what we were designed to do. Instead of us going out and bringing the chaotic futility in the world into useful structure, we went out and became subjected to that very futility.

Now, even though we had the breath of God in us that gave us the sort of life force that would enable us to carry out our commission we did not have all that was needed. However much of himself God put in us was enough for us to do our job but we still needed instruction on how to get that job done. We can see our lack of knowledge in that God gave us a command: "do not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, if you do you will die." This is something important that he seems confident that we would not know otherwise. I don't think that this sort of lack of pragmatic knowledge about what may be dangerous in the environment is all that is going on. It would seem that God's direction to us to "finish the earth" would indicate that there is a completed state that God is expecting. Furthermore, it appears that he has some manner of strategy whereby to achieve it that he hasn't built into us, neither into the earth stuff he made us out of nor into the bit of himself that he put into us. So to be successful at the purpose for which we were designed and put on this earth we would need to obey God.

Okay, wait. Where did this obey stuff come from? Remember that this story does not necessarily intend to be a historical account of some dude named Adam and his hot broad Eve and whether or not they had bellybuttons. The primary point of this story is to get at what is going on in the world in terms of God, humans, the rest of the world, how problematic the world is, and that the world is at odds with how we expect it should be. So the tree might not actually be a magic apple tree that takes away our superpowers. It may just represent something else. Now remember that the tree is not the tree of evil, we do not consume evil by eating of that tree. It is the tree of "the knowledge of good and evil." Knowing both good and evil. Consuming this "fruit" is taking into ourselves the distinction of good from evil. We gain our own understanding of right from wrong. We have a term for this: systematized morality or ethics. Why is it that this would lead to death?

Well, remember the thing that I haven't mentioned yet? There was another tree in the garden. The tree of life. Remember what made us living beings? God breathing into us his Spirit. In the two trees the story places these two things in opposition: knowledge of good and evil (ethical regulations as such) and life (being the very presence of God in the world.) Now, God is not us, God made all of this, and God has a plan and strategy for how to finish what he has started. For us to know what this plan and strategy is he has to tell us, for us to execute God's plan and strategy we need to obey him. If we are obeying a set of ethical regulations are we obeying God? No, we are obeying a set of ethical regulations. If we are not obeying God and his strategy and plan for this world are we truly his presence in the world? No, in disobeying God we set ourselves over against his plans for the world and in doing so we lost that which made us alive (the tree of life, the breath of God), that which made us the very presence of God in this world. Having lost that life force by which we would have been able to subdue the useless chaos of the not yet complete creation, we became subjected to its futility.

Out in the chaos of the world, unable to break free of the stupid futility, useless chaos and weeping and wailing and the gnashing of teeth.

Part 4

Shameless Foundations: Part 2-Humanity

Part 1

So God is shaping the world out of the chaotic lump of cosmic stuff. Making progress, things are taking shape, then he gets to us.

God formed humanity out of the stuff of this earth. We are intrinsically part of this place. We do not belong somewhere else. This is literally our native ground.

Now, how the text talks about the establishment of humanity is important, and a little history is in order. In the cultures around which this story was written there were certain rituals for worship that are pertinent to the meaning of the Biblical story. When it was determined that a new temple was in order the first thing to be done was to plant a sacred grove, a garden if you will, that would demarcate the holy precinct. Then the priests would form the image of the god out of clay, or wood, or metal and would put it in the garden. Then the priests would perform a ceremony in which the breath or spirit of whatever god the image was of would come into the idol and the image would thereby become the very presence of that god in the earth. If you don't know the Biblical story take a look at it in the first two chapters of Genesis. Notice the similarities. The Genesis story was written to people familiar with these forms of worship. Notice how Genesis subverts the story and applies it to humanity. After establishing the the sacred grove, God himself forms the human as an image of himself, he places the human in the garden and puts his breath or spirit into the human and this breath is the thing that makes the human a living being. Let it hit hard: the human is the idol that God himself formed of himself and then put his own Spirit into to make the human the very presence of himself in the world.

By God's decision we are made of the stuff of this world, this is our place, and God has designed us to be his very presence in this world and in the beginning that is what we were. That is what we were intended to be. God also had a purpose for us. He made us for a job, a function, a task and not merely to simply be in some blissed out garden of Eden. First we were to tend the garden, then God gave us our orders. God formed us here and made us his very presence in this world to "go forth and multiply and subdue the earth."

Okay, remember that the garden was a special niche that God had carved out of the larger world which he was making, that is, wresting from chaos and futility. God could very well have fully ordered the whole thing completely but the way he did it is how he in fact decided to do it. In this context God forms us as his image, puts us that carved out garden, makes us into his very presence in the world and then commands us to complete the last bits of making this world. In us, God put himself into this world to finish making it but in such a way that we, this world's native inhabitants, get the huge dignity and honor and responsibility of fully participating in this act of creation.

What I have said here differs somewhat from most standard understandings on many points of this story. One big one is the "image of God." In most models the "image of God" is taken in terms of a reflection in a mirror or a painting. Such understandings work to find links between humans and God in terms of attributes (in the same way a picture is similar to the model that posed for it.) They derive principles of the divine nature from looking at the seemingly higher aspects of humanity: we are creative, God is creative therefore creativity is part of what it is to be the image of God the same with choice making, rationality, etc. What we end up with is a collection of observed human attributes that we project on or link to the divine nature (at least to the degree that we claim to know and understand it as such.) All this "image of God" does is ratify the human as defined by the human as next to the divine in the human's own eyes. What I am proposing is not some formal similarity but an actual presence. This actual presence constitutes the power by which we may accomplish the task for which we were designed--which brings me to the other difference I want to point out. In most models, humans are passive creatures put here kinda to just hang out and be mellow with God and stuff. What I am saying is that humanity is instrumental. God created us to a specific function within this creation. A function that if we don't do doesn't get done.

You are designed by God to be his very presence in this world, filled with his breath, to bring the perfection of this world to completion.

Part 3 
Part 4

Shameless Foundations: Part 1-The Beginning

I was planning on holding off starting this series until I had finished the "Running From A Shameful Gospel" series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.  I had my strategy planned out to get the list of criticisms all out before I started the constructive work that I am starting here. The problem is that it is really difficult for me to critically analyze something that I have left behind. At some point I will go back and finish that series. But, after I published my last post I realized that I had better get some constructive "This is what I believe and these are the foundations, see I am not quite the sort of dangerous raving heretic you are starting to think I am" sort of material up here in an attempt to not completely alienate conscientious Christians.

This is what is going on in the world.

God chose to make this world in the way that he decided to make this world. He made this world rather than some other world, which he could very well have done. In fact, he my very well have done so but that is not particularly relevant to us because this, in fact, is the world that he put us in. He may very well have put creatures very like us in other worlds but neither is that relevant because, again, we are, in fact, here. This is important to remember this lest we decide to turn God into a set of principles and derive an ideology from our interpretation of those principles. This world derives from the contingency of God's decision making and not from some set of supposedly absolute principles. God can do whatever God wants to do for whatever reasons God wants to do it. Who are we to tell him otherwise?

So, God decided to make this world. He then got down to it however he got down to it. Whether he did it fast or slow or a little here a little there it doesn't really matter. I have no intention of embroiling myself in the ideologically prejudiced (on both sides) street fights (picturing "Anchor Man") as to how the universe came into being. At a deep epistemological level we can't really prove anything and even if someone happened to "get the right answer" there is no way we could be sure that it was in fact right. Human knowledge is limited not only in the amount of stuff we can know but in the surety we can actually have of the accuracy of that knowledge. So stand back and let me work what I got.

The point of the creation story(s) in scripture is not to give a modern textbook blow-by-blow of what actually happened. The people who wrote them and read them didn't care about that. The writers cared about God's relationship to this world and mankind's place in it. Now, telling a story talking about that in terms of the original formation of everything seems to me like a pretty crunchy thing to do. They wrote it, we didn't, who are we to complain. So what do they say?

God's creative movement in this world constitutes pushing back, even subverting the "formless and void." Actually a better modern translation of this would be "useless and chaotic." Now these adjectives describe the initial state of the cosmic "all of this." The picture is like God started by just kinda throwing a lump of stuff out there and it is a big mess which he then begins to form. Right off there is the clear impression the the Spirit or Breath has a very important function in policing the useless chaos (the "deep" was a particularly potent image of the power of that useless chaos the power of meaningless futility.) So God progressively orders the world bit by bit and then humans happen....

Part 2 
Part 3 
Part 4