The promise of Rest

What is the significance of the seventh day in the Genesis creation saga? This follows up on my previous post about the significance of God resting on the seventh day the commandment to keep the Sabbath. I am reading through Exodus and today I got to chapter 31. I found it noteworthy that the last thing the LORD said to Moses before he gave him the two tablets:

¹⁵ Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the LORD. Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day shall be put to death. ¹⁶Therefore the people of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, observing the Sabbath throughout their generations, as a covenant forever. ¹⁷ It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.

Again the creation account is linked to the covenant, to the Sabbath rest, and to life and death.

Creation history or creation of a history?

It is popular folklore that 150 years ago in Oxford there was a watershed event in the history of the relationship between science and Christianity: the Wilberforce-Huxley debate about Darwin's recently published On the Origin of Species.
At the Polkinghorne 80th birthday conference this week in Oxford we were given copies of two recent articles by the Oxford historian Allan Chapman from the Oxford Magazine, "Monkeying about with History: Remembering the `Great Debate'  of 1860?" and "Aping our Ancestors: how the `Great Debate' of 1860 was invented". [Unfortunately, I cannot find copies online].

The first article notes that there are no surviving records of the actual content of the debate and reviews documents from the period that show that it actually generated little discussion at the time. Hence, it is not clear that it really was a watershed event.
The second article reviews the historical background of the emerging struggle between the "Grand Amateurs" of British science who were often clergyman and privately funded [e.g. Wilberforce and Darwin] how the debate and the new generation of "professional" scientists [embodied by Huxley] who aspired to work in secular institutions and receive government funding for their research. Decades later, for the purposes of the political agenda of the latter camp [embodied in the X-Club founded by Huxley] a mythical version of the debate where science triumphed over religion seemed to have served a useful polemical purpose.

In 2001 John Hedley Brooke, previously Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion, at Oxford gave a nice lecture on the same topic at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.


History always seems to be more complicated than we would like to think.

A scientist looks at the Nicene creed

I am enjoying reading John Polkinghorne's Science and Christian Belief: Theological reflections of a bottom-up thinker. He takes the Nicene Creed and reflects on it phrase by phase. The book is based on his 1993-1994 Gifford lectures.

Quantum theory is like a drug

I am in Oxford for a conference Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality, in honour of the 80th Birthday of Sir John Polkinghorne.

Here is some of the last two paragraphs of Polkinghorne's book Quantum Theory: A very short introduction.

It seems appropriate to close this chapter with an intellectual health warning. Quantum theory is certainly strange and surprising, but it is not so odd that according to it `anything goes.' Of course, no one would actually argue with such crudity, but there is a kind of discourse that can come perilously close to adopting that caricature attitude. One might call it `quantum hype.' I want to suggest that sobriety is in order when making an appeal to quantum insight.

..... Wave/particle duality is a highly surprising and instructive phenomenon, whose seemingly paradoxical character has been resolved for us by the insights of quantum field theory. It does not, however, afford us a license to indulge in embracing any pair of apparently contradictory notions that take our fancy. Like a powerful drug, quantum theory is wonderful when applied correctly, disastrous when abused and misapplied.

The cartoon is from xkcd.

Giving the seven day creation a rest

What are the creation texts in Genesis really about it?
A colleague has continually emphasized to me that a main point of Genesis 1-2 is to teach the Israelites to keep the Sabbath. Genesis 2 says:

²And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. ³So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.

I thought he was pushing this point too far because it seems to diminish the significance of Genesis 1 and all it tells us. But then this morning (on the Sabbath) I read in the ten commandments (Exodus 20):

⁸ "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. ⁹ Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, ¹⁰but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. ... ¹¹For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

Here is a little of Karl Barth's commentary on Genesis 2:3

the real question is whether it is not a modern notion to interpret rest in the sense of recuperation after preceding exhaustion. It is true that in the parallel in Ex. 31¹⁷ God's resting after the completion of creation is connected with the concept of "refreshment"(naphash), and that in Ex. 23¹² this refreshment is also ascribed to the "son of thy handmaid" and the "stranger" who are also to keep the Sabbath. But as a comment on "resting" the term "refreshment rdquo; inclines us in the direction of "coming to oneself" or "reviving." And if (apart from the later laws of the Sabbath, cf. Ex. 20^8f., etc.) the decisive commentary is to be sought in the connexion, indicated in the passage itself ( v. 3), with the day which is blessed and sanctified for man by divine precedent, it must be said that according to Ex. 16²⁹ the Sabbath is a divine gift to man. In bringing relief, it means positive blessedness, freedom, joy, rest and-it may be added-peace. ......

 In fact, however, the saga says and means the very opposite. It is a part of the history of creation that God completed His work and confronted it as a completed totality. The true and finished world in its actual constitution is heaven and earth and all the host of them, not without but with the God who willed and created them as the world, and who now confronts them in this being of theirs as the Lord. On the seventh day God was blessed as the One who had thus completed the world. And for this reason He has blessed and sanctified the seventh day to man as a day on which man may also be blessed and free and joyful, resting from his labours, belonging to himself in peace, breathing freely and being refreshed.

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 3.1 Doctrine of Creation, pp. 221-222

Movie worth watching

Two nights ago my family watched a DVD of The Blind Side, for which Sandra Bullock received an Academy Award as best actress.
The movie is quite funny and inspiring. It does raise significant issues of social justice and racism and how they interact with sport, both for good and bad.

There is an interesting extract in the New York Times from the book on which the movie is based. I found it interesting that this is one of the few cases of a movie which very closely follows the true story.

To me the story underscored the value of the requirements that US college athletes have to keep a minimum academic standard in order to play. I think this is clearly in their best interest.

Six propositions about science and the Bible

I have been thinking about the following question: What are the really key ideas that Christians need to understand about the relationship between science and the Bible?

This has been stimulated by two events. First, I will be giving some lectures next month on the topic at Protestant Theological Seminary in Novi Sad, Serbia.
Second, I have a friend is going to teach science in a Christian university in Africa, and has asked for advice on relevant materials.

So, here is my first pass at some of the essential ideas/propositions.

1. The God of the Bible is both the Creator of the physical universe and the Redeemer of humanity

2. Science and the Bible have distinct purposes and present complementary pictures of the reality of the natural world.

3. Science cannot explain why it works.

4. Both science and the Bible raise many confusing unanswered questions. This should not lead to invocation of mysticism, miraculous divine intervention, nor pessimistic postmodernism or relativism, but rather should lead to humble investigation.

5. Philosophical perspectives and the scientific knowledge that stimulates them do not have the same truth certainty.

6. A distinction must be made between belief in evolution as a biological process and belief in evolution as a world view (emphasized by Tim Keller).

I welcome comments and suggestions.