Alice C. Linsley
The more I study Genesis, the more convinced I become that the book isn't about human origns. It is about the origins of Messianic expectation. Genesis is about the ruler-priests of Abraham's Horite caste and their faith in the promise that the Creator made to their ancestors in Eden.That said, Evangelical scientists are still trying to use Genesis to develop a model that reconciles current scientific (read evolutionary) understanding of human origins with the Genesis creation stories.
Denis Alexander, Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge recently gave a talk in which he stated this:
Building models to relate biblical texts to science requires no concordist interpretations of the text (in the traditional sense of the word ‘concordist’). The disciplines of both science and theology should be accorded their own integrity. The Genesis texts should be allowed to speak within their own contexts and thought-forms, which are clearly very distant from those of modern science. We can all agree that the early chapters of Genesis exist to convey theology and not science. The task of models is then to explore how the theological truths of Genesis might relate to our current scientific understanding of human origins.
Read more here.
There is a great difficulty here since the very notion of evolution is contradictory to understanding of creation held by those who gave us the Genesis material. They viewed the creation as having a fixed geometry, exhibiting a fixed order, with fixed boundaries between species.
Further, African origin stories can't be forced into an evolutionary mold. The idea that humans evolved from apes is considered an insult. Dr Mathole Motshekga, Executive Director: Kara Heritage Institute (IKS), has written: "The Custodians of African heritage, the Amakhosi and Izinyaka do not know or accept that humanity and Africans in particular descended from the baboons of Maropeng (Sterksfontein), they regard this as an insult visited on them by archeologists and paleontologists. They want the same amount of resources given to these so-called experts to be given to IKS researchers and custodians to research and document the African Genesis (i.e. the true story of our origins)."
In the West, people believe that change over time is progress. That's an illusion because nothing changes. This existence is one unchanging Reality, and prayer is a spiritual nod to this single Reality.
This is why the debate continues between anthropologists who are willing to admit that there is no physical evidence for macro-evolution and biologists who have taken Darwin as their religion.
Related reading: "Q and A on Creaton vs. Evolution"; "Genesis and Genetics"; The Genesis Creation Stories; Overview of Human Origins
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6 comments:
Have you read Fr. Eugene Pentiuc's Jesus the Messiah in the Hebrew Bible? This is exactly what Fr. Pentiuc teaches.
I haven't read Fr. Pentiuc's book, but I will. It sounds like a book that I'd like to review for readers of Just Genesis. Do you know the publisher?
John: Retired and have a passion for Genesis. That is how I found your work. I am not intelligent or educated enough to make comments about the material, but your blog speaks to me! I have read Genesis more than I can recall but when I begin to read the book as a book regarding Messianic Expectation ...... boy- oh boy- oh boy! Thank you very much Alice C. Linsley.
Thank you, John.
The ruler-priests among Abraham's ancestors believed in a Creator who had a son. They expected salvation to be by the actions of the Father and the Son. When we study their beliefs anthropologically, we see that divine kingship and the deliverance of the people to immortality were central beliefs that gave way to Messianic expectation. The pattern is reflected in the expectancy of the Promised Heir and the marriage and ascendancy pattern of the Horite Hebrew rulers.
See these articles:
http://biblicalanthropology.blogspot.com/2016/05/seated-with-christ.html
http://biblicalanthropology.blogspot.com/2012/02/righteous-rulers-and-resurrection.html
http://biblicalanthropology.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-urheimat-of-canaanite-y.html
http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-years-of-waiting-for-promised-heir.html
Thank you for reading JUST GENESIS.
Genesis surely is about human origins. Come to think of it. Of all rivers that watered the Garden of Eden,it is only the Nile that has the following:
a)origin at the centre of earth. Equator passes via lake Victoria.
b)the oldest extra biblical archaeological evidence of the Tetragrammaton.
c)the oldest and largest collection o hominid fossils.
If Genesis wasn't about human origins what would it be about?
Thank you, Ed, for that thoughtful comment. Genesis is foundational to the rest of the Bible. It tells us about the early Hebrew ruler priests, a caste of "mighty men" who dispersed widely in the service of kingdom builders such a Nimrod. It tells us very little about the archaic humans living along the Nile millions of years ago. It begins with Adam and Eve and their sons and their sons' wives, all of whom lived no earlier than about 5000 BC. The oldest known site of Horite Hebrew worship was at Nekhen on the Nile (c. 4000 BC). It is not surprising then that the themes of Genesis 1-3 closely parallel themes found among Nilotic populations.
https://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-themes-of-genesis-1-3.html
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