God Against the Gods: Storytelling, Imagination and Apologetics in the Bible by Brian Godawa

Author:Brian Godawa [Godawa, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Embedded Pictures Publishing
Published: 2016-03-31T06:00:00+00:00

It would also be a mistake to claim that there is a single monolithic Mesopotamian cosmography.151 There are varieties of stories with overlapping imagery, and some contradictory notions. But there are certainly enough commonalities to affirm a generic yet mysterious picture of the universe. And that picture in Scripture undeniably includes poetic language. The Hebrew culture was imaginative. They integrated poetry into everything, including their observational descriptions of nature. Thus a hymn of creation such as Psalm 19 tells of the heavens declaring God’s glory as if using speech, and then describes the operations of the sun in terms of a bridegroom in his chamber or a man running a race. Metaphor is inescapable and ubiquitous.

And herein lies a potential solution for the dilemma of the scientific inaccuracy of the Mesopotamian cosmic geography in Scripture: The Israelite culture, being pre-scientific, thought more in terms of function and purpose than material structure. Even if their picture of the heavens and earth as a three-tiered geocentric cosmology, was scientifically “false,” from our modern perspective, it nevertheless still accurately describes the teleological purpose and meaning of creation that they were intending to communicate.

Othmar Keel, one of the leading scholars on Ancient Near Eastern art has argued that even though modern depictions of the ancient worldview like the illustration of the three-tiered universe above are helpful, they are fundamentally flawed because they depict a “profane, lifeless, virtually closed mechanical system,” which reflects our own modern bias. To the ancient Near East “rather, the world was an entity open at every side. The powers which determine the world are of more interest to the ancient Near East than the structure of the cosmic system. A wide variety of diverse, uncoordinated notions regarding the cosmic structure were advanced from various points of departure.”152

John Walton has written recently of this ANE concern with powers over structure in direct relation to the creation story of Genesis. He argues that in the ancient world existence was understood more in terms of function within a god-created purposeful order than in terms of material status within a natural physical structure.153 This is not to say that the physical world was denied or ignored, but rather that the priority and interests were different from our own. We should therefore be careful in judging their purpose-driven cosmography too strictly in light of our own material-driven cosmography. And in this sense, modern material descriptions of reality are just as “false” as the ancient pictures because they do not include the immaterial aspect of reality: Meaning and purpose.

Biblical writers did not teach their cosmography as scientific doctrine revealed by God about the way the physical universe was materially structured, they assumed the popular cosmography to teach their doctrine about God’s purposes and intent. To critique the cosmic model carrying the message is to miss the meaning altogether, which is the message. God’s throne may not be physically above us in waters held back by a solid firmament, but He truly does rule “over” us and is king and sustainer of creation in whatever model man uses to depict that creation.

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