Progressive Creation and the Struggles of Humanity in the Bible

A Canonical Narrative Interpretation

Dornyei

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781532633904
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Why does the Christian walk often feel like an ongoing struggle and why does God's creation include imperfection, let alone forces that are intent on thwarting God's creative work? In seeking a response to these questions, this book argues that the biblical accounts describe creation in terms of a progressive transformation process whereby the initially incomplete created order will reach perfection only in the fulfillment of new creation. The following discussion then outlines a comprehensive framework for the biblical theology of humanity's struggles, centered on three key themes: corporeal temptation, deficient social structures, and the much-debated notion of spiritual warfare.The book presents an overarching canonical narrative that threads together a series of diverse biblical topics, from Job's temptation to the Atonement. The final part surveys biblical teaching on how human conduct can be aligned with God's creative purpose, and discusses three "assignments" from Jesus to believers: to celebrate the Eucharist, to pray the Lord's Prayer, and to fulfill the Great Commission.

1

Setting the Scene

Hermeneutical Approach, the Christian Doctrine of Creation, and Different Conceptions of Spiritual Warfare

The main arguments and claims of this book have largely been derived from exegesis that employs a canonical narrative interpretation of Scripture, and the following chapters will present a canonical narrative of progressive creation that overarches the whole biblical canon from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation. In order to set the scene for the forthcoming discussion, the current chapter provides an overview of the broader scholarly context of three central topics, the hermeneutical approach adopted for the study, the Christian doctrine of creation, and the main conceptions of spiritual warfare in contemporary theology. These summaries are intended to situate the primary themes of the book in existing theological paradigms, and they also provide a backdrop against which the new elements of the work can be appraised.

The discussion of the first topic, the characterization of the hermeneutical approach employed in this work, will address the origins and the distinctive features of the canonical narrative analysis, and it will also include a synopsis of the specific narrative presented in the following chapters. The overview of the Christian doctrine of creation has been warranted by the substantial role that creational issues have assumed in the overall discussion as well as by the fact that the creational perspective taken in this book is nontraditional in its emphasis on the unfolding process rather than the origins of creation. Finally, as was explained in the Preface, although the study of spiritual warfare, which constituted the initial focal issue of the investigation, has been integrated into a wider construal concerning the inherent imperfections of human creatureliness and the ensuing struggles of humankind, the role of spiritual forces opposing God’s creative work remains an important element in the discussion; a summary of different understandings of spiritual warfare is also necessitated by the controversial and often misunderstood nature of this subject both in theology and in church circles.

1.1 Hermeneutical Approach

The hermeneutical approach adopted for the analysis of Scripture—a canonical narrative interpretation—has been inspired and modelled by Kendall Soulen book on The God of Israel and Christian Theology,1 even though the actual canonical narrative proposed by Soulen has a different focus to the current work: He was primarily concerned with the continuing theological importance of Judaism for Christianity and what he saw as doctrinal supersessionism rooted in an inadequate reading of the canon, whereas—as was explained in the Preface—the current book explores the creational implications on humanity’s plight. Let us start the examination of the specifics of this hermeneutical method by first considering two concepts that are central to the perspective taken in this book, “canon” and “composition.”

Canon and Composition

The current book follows the hermeneutic tradition whereby the full canonical message of the Bible is taken to be delivered by the constituent texts in concert, and this unifying principle applies not only to the books within the two Testaments but also across them. The perception of a unified biblical testimony can be traced back to the traditional doctrine of the “harmony of Scripture,” which posits that because the various parts of the biblical canon have all originated from God, they represent different forms of expression of the same divine purpose,2 a unity acknowledged by most Christian denominations.3 Regarding the much debated question of which biblical books comprise the canonical corpus, the current work takes an unmarked position and considers—as mentioned briefly in the Preface—only the sixty-six books of the Protestant canon. There is virtually complete agreement in contemporary Christianity about the canonical status of these books, and this is hoped to limit the vulnerability of the exegesis of this corpus. The specific canonical analysis follows a “final-form approach,” which takes into account the findings of textual criticism but which stops short of attending to any “non-manuscript-based reconstruction of the text”4 (Peckham).

One useful way of understanding the interrelated and interdependent nature of the assembled texts within the whole of the canon is to see them forming parts of an overall biblical composition. The term “composition” has been most commonly used in visual arts and music, where it refers to the different aspects of a work of art that combine to produce a harmonious whole. The analogy between artistic and biblical compositions was first highlighted by Irenaeus of Lyons in a famous passage from Against Heresies in which he discusses how Gnostic heresy falsified the biblical truth.5 He compared the Bible to a beautiful image of a king, constructed by a skillful artist out of precious stones, and likened the Gnostic practice of choosing biblical passages and putting them together in a way that they seemingly supported their nonbiblical scheme to the act of rearranging the gems “into the form of a dog or of a fox, and even that but poorly executed.” The remarkable aspect of Irenaeus’s point is that the false images are constructed from the same components as the true ones and it is only the order of the components that was falsified to create deception. This foregrounding of the significance of the individual parts’ position in relation to the whole constitutes a genuinely compositional approach.6 Matthew Emerson argues that sequencing principles also play a role at the macro-level of the canon,7 which is prominently illustrated, for example, by the different ordering of the books of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament: The former ends with 2 Chronicles, whereas the Old Testament ends with Malachi, which provides a smooth link with the New Testament.8

Adopting a compositional perspective on how the textual elements within the biblical canon relate to each other can help to deal with instances when the assumed harmony of Scripture is seemingly broken. As Robert Alter, among others, points out, there are certain biblical passages that “seem to resist any harmonizing interpretation,”9 for example when the narratives contain some obvious contradictions. A common response in historical-critical scholarship to such “difficult” texts has been to assume that they are the outcome of some human error or distortion that occurred after the specific text was authored (e.g., copying mistake, redactional inconsistency, questionable editorial “clarification” or “improvement,” etc.). However, Alter argues that some of the textual conflicts ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Setting the Scene
• Chapter 2: The Accounts of Creation in Genesis 1–2
• Chapter 3: The Futility of Creation and the Fall
• Chapter 4: Ongoing Creation and New Creation
• Chapter 5: Spiritual Opposition and Jesus Christ’s Victory
• Chapter 6: Three Assignments from Jesus
• Chapter 7: Humanity’s Plight and “Fighting the Good Fight of the Faith . . .”
• Conclusion
• Bibliography