Vibrant Dance 2: Breakout Session 2: John Walton

On this Remembrance Day (Veterans Day), thank you to all who have said no to self and served this nation. May the Lord lift you up and sustain you for all your days, receiving you into His arms at journey’s end.

{RJW Note:  The final session of the conference was composed of breakout sessions by the various speakers to interact with attendees about the day’s panel discussions. I again attended Dr. John Walton’s session as a TA. It was primarily a Q&A format, so where necessary for context, the gist of the question is presented with the answer immediately following. As before, Genesis 1 and 2 are abbreviated as G1 and G2 respectively. Again, full audio and video of the conference (including the breakouts with the other speakers are available at www.vibrantdance.org.}

In Revelation, when it declares there is no sea, it is a functionality argument—no more chaos, not no more water.

To have “consistent hermeneutics” is to be a competent reader of what the author writes and an ethical reader of his words (versus how in literary criticism the reader starts out with disbelief). Virtuous readers use their perlocution {how the information is received by the audience} to identify what the human author intended and this can be applied regardless of genre. He is concerned with the label ‘history’ as a genre, it may indicate the subject is real and true but that label doesn’t say how authors communicate their reality. For example, it is not an ethical hermeneutic to apply standards of photography to modern art. It is competent to read a document as intended by the author. We have to understand authors’ conventions, not impose our conventions, but theirs.

Vibrant Dance 2: Beall: Genesis 1-2: A Literal Reading

The first position paper presented at Vibrant Dance, Theology Edition, was by Dr. Todd Beall, Professor of Old Testament, Capital Bible Seminary, Lanham, Maryland. An apparent late request to each speaker was to start with a brief overview of their epistemology and hermeneutics in the presentation of their specific interpretation. Dr. Beall provided some notes to the audience to aid in his talk. Due to time constraints, he skimmed some sections. He supports the idea that the earth is a few thousand, rather than billions of years old, also known as “young-earth creationism.”

I have debated over whether to present the position papers with or without comment, and have concluded without. At the end of the series, I will offer commentary on the symposium as a whole, which you are welcome to bronze or tar and feather, at your pleasure.

First, there are some things Beall said in the talk that were outside his notes, so I share them here in the order he shared them, but not in the context of his notes. Beall began by affirming his subscription to the Chicago Statements presented by Blaising, primarily Articles 20-22. Also, he commented that he is less concerned with the age of the earth than with reading Scripture clearly, and that he believes that Origins is a subject area outside of the purview of science, so trying to reconcile science and Creation is pointless {my word not his}. Dr. Beall started off college as a pre-med, so has taken a large amount of science classes. He talked favorably about Darwin and Darwin’s passage on the mystery of the eye. He believes Christians can be of any of the three views (young earth, old earth and theistic evolution), and is willing to fellowship with them—we’ll get to heaven and then someone will have to apologize. (tongue-in-cheek tone)

(Incidentally, let me plug the ABBYY Fine Reader OCR software for its amazing job at converting the scanned image to text with very few corrections—it even got most of the Hebrew mostly correct in one pass!! There do seem to be some places where font and formatting have gotten corrupted. I apologize for any confusion.) Here begins Dr. Beall’s notes.

Does our view of Genesis 1 really matter? Yes, it does. Creation is a powerful witness to God (general revelation: Rom 1:18-21; Ps 19:1). That is why the first few chapters of Genesis are under such attack today.

1.            What does Genesis 1 (and subsequent chapters) actually say?

Vibrant Dance 2: Blaising: What Is At Stake: A Call For Gracious Discourse

{RJW Note:  This is the text of the first plenary session at this weekend’s Vibrant Dance conference. In an effort to accurately relate the views of the speakers, I tried to obtain their notes and permission to share them directly whenever possible. Every speaker I approached was more than gracious, even giving me from their hands their notes with handwritten modifications. I am most grateful to these gentlemen.

This talk is from Dr. Craig Blaising, the Provost and Executive Vice President of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Ft. Worth, TX. He has very graciously updated and emailed his 45 minute talk to me to share with you. I have only made the most minor of edits to be consistent with the format generally used here, issues of spacing and paragraphs mostly. Below is his text and work, so this amounts to a guest post. Again, I am grateful for his willingness to share it so generously.

Dr. Blaising also served as the moderator for the talks and panel discussion, so this talk served as an introduction and setting of format for the entire conference, so having it verbatim is particularly important.}

The biblical doctrine of creation teaches that God, acting alone, freely, by His own will and power created all things—the entire universe, the heavens, the earth and all that is in them. He brought all of it into being out of nothing—no preexistent material, no prior stuff, matter or energy. And, what he brought into being out of nothing, he has shaped and formed, preserved, ordered and upheld as the world and universe in which we live, inclusive of our very own selves.

            God acted alone in creation

                        I am the Lord, who made all things,

                        Who alone stretched out the heavens,

                        Who spread out the earth by myself.

Neither is the universe or anything in it including ourselves or anything about ourselves an extension or division from, or portion of, God's own being, which is simply to say that there is nothing in and nothing about the universe that is in itself eternal or ontologically necessary—none of its powers, processes, or component parts. No part or aspect of the universe functions as or constitutes its ontological ground. All of it exists by a will and wisdom that is ontologically separate from it.