{"id":1556,"date":"2010-12-06T09:17:43","date_gmt":"2010-12-06T16:17:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=1556"},"modified":"2010-12-06T09:17:43","modified_gmt":"2010-12-06T16:17:43","slug":"cunningham-what-genesis-doesnt-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2010\/12\/06\/cunningham-what-genesis-doesnt-say\/","title":{"rendered":"Cunningham: What Genesis Doesn't Say"},"content":{"rendered":"

Conor Cunningham<\/a> — my doctoral advisor at Nottingham if I end up pursuing that degree —\u00a0 offers an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong<\/a>, on Christian Century<\/a>.\u00a0 I love his discussion of the early Fathers and his approach to Christ as the hinge of all theology of creation:<\/p>\n

Adam, the idea of a Fall and so on can be revealed only in Christ if we are to remain faithful to the church fathers. It is folly to interpret the Fall or the existence of Adam in either positivistic or strictly historical terms, since there is no Fall before Christ. That is to say, there was but a glimmer of its occurrence, and this glimmer was only about Christ and not about some historical event of the same genus as the Battle of Trafalgar. Moreover, before Christ there was neither death nor life nor even sin. For all such concepts find their truth only in the passion of the Christ, and for one very simple reason: creation is about Christ and nothing else. Jesus, as the Word of God, is the metaphysical or ontological beginning and end (telos<\/em>) of all that exists. This is not some wishy-washy religious nonsense but is, on the contrary, perfectly logical.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We should therefore bear in mind that, for theology, protology leads to eschatology. So, for example, according to the church fathers, Adam was Christ and Eve was Mary, while paradise is the church, and the Fall signals humankind’s redemption in Christ. Indeed, without Christ there would be no need of redemption\u2014so the Fall would not make any sense. Thus the Fall is never a stand-alone item and makes no sense on its own.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conor Cunningham — my doctoral advisor at Nottingham if I end up pursuing that degree —\u00a0 offers an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get it Wrong, on Christian Century.\u00a0 I love his discussion of the early Fathers and his approach to Christ as the hinge of all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31,50,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biblical-studies","category-science-and-religion","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-p6","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}