Genesis and Spirituality
You may (or may not) have noticed that I haven’t been posting much. That will be fairly common I think just because of the nature of my studies right now, but I will do what I can.
One of the readings for my Christian Spirit class was from Deryck Sheriffs’ “Walking with God.” and I liked this quote:
Genesis tells a story of human origins too. Unlike the scientific disciplines of biology and paleoanthropology in which storytelling and teleological language is out of place, the Genesis story interprets human history on earth in terms of a history that is going somewhere with God.
And this from Eugene Peterson’s “Saint Mark. The Basic Text for Christian Spirituality”:
What happens here (in Mark 8:27-9:9) is that we are invited into becoming full participants in the story of Jesus, and shown how to become such participants. We are not simply told that Jesus is the Son of God; we not only become beneficiaries of his atonement; we are invited to die his death and live his life with the freedom and dignity of participants. And here is a marvellous thing: we enter the centre of the story without becoming the centre of the story.
And finally this from Jean Sullivan (as quote in the Peterson article):
The fundamental insight of the Bible… is that the invisible can speak only by the perceptable.
How do you like that?
Ή χάρις του κυρίου ημων Ίησου Χριστου μεθ’ υμων.
Reference
Deryck Sheriffs, “Walking with God,” chap. in The Friendship of the Lord: An Old Testament Spirituality (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1996), 27-61.
Eugene H. Peterson, “Saint Mark. The Basic Text for Christian Spirituality,” Crux 29 (1993): 2-9.
Jean Sullivan, Morning Light, p. 18.
I definitely agree that science is not a story about humans. I also argue to my students (not sure how successfully) that any field that does focus on humans is engineering, not science. For example, medicine, as it’s focused on finding cures to human ailments, rather than learning about how viruses mutate just for the sake of knowing. Or sometimes it’s pseudoscience, like astrology, but that’s a different issue.
BTW, when’d you join Blogexplosion? Or have you been on it all along and I just never noticed?
Well said. There should also be a distinction between science and technology, that seems to always get blurred together. Technology is the application of science. And there is WAY too much pseudoscience out there!
I have been with Blog Explosion for almost a year now. I think that might be how I initially stumbled upon your blog.
I miss college now. How often do you get to use the word “teleogical”?! I think I’m going to make my children learn that one-I’ll put it next to “etiological” and see what happnes
.
Haha, I don’t think I have ever actually used teleogical before this and what are the odds that I will use it again?