Footnotes
footnotes
For a much more full treatment of the material in the next few paragraphs see He Is There and He Is Not Silent (Tyndale House Publishers, 1972).
See Back to Freedom and Dignity (InterVarsity Press, 1972), in which I deal with B. F. Skinner’s book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971).
The biblical teaching concerning the Trinity is, of course, developed more fully in the New Testament, but for other indications of the Trinity in the Old Testament see Gen. 11:7; Is. 6:8; 44:6; and 48:16.
The Greek aorist is a once-for-all past tense.
This verse is sometimes used by those who say faith itself gives knowledge and thus undercuts the necessity of the content of Scripture. However, it is Scripture which gives the knowledge that is referred to here, and then we, on the basis of what the Bible claims is sufficient reason, believe what God has told us in the Bible.
There may be a difference between the methodology by which we gain knowledge from what God tells us in the Bible and the methodology by which we gain it from scientific study, but this does not lead to a dichotomy as to the facts. In practice it may not always be possible to correlate the two studies because of the special situation involved, yet if both studies can be adequately pursued, there will be no final conflict. For example, the Tower of Babel: whether we come at it from biblical knowledge given by God or by scientific study, either way when we are done with our study, the Tower of Babel was either there or it was not there. The same thing is true of Adam. Whether we begin with the conceptual apparatus of archaeology and anthropology or whether we begin with the knowledge given us in the Bible, if it were within the realm of science’s knowledge to do so, in both cases we would end with knowledge about Adam’s bones. Science by its natural limitations cannot know all we know from God in the Bible, but in those cases where science can know, both sources of knowledge arrive at the same point, even if the knowledge is expressed in different terms. And it is important to keep in mind that there is a great difference between saying the same thing in two different symbol systems and actually saying two different exclusive things but hiding the difference with the two symbol systems. What the Bible teaches where it touches history and the cosmos and what science teaches where it touches the same areas do not stand in a discontinuity. There indeed must be a place for the study of general revelation (the universe and its form, and man with his mannishness), that is, a place for true science. But on the other side, it must be understood that there is no automatic need to accommodate the Bible to the statements of science. There is a tendency for some who are Christians and scientists to always place special revelation (the teaching of the Bible) under the control of general revelation and science, and never or rarely to place general revelation and what science teaches under the control of the Bible’s teaching. That is, though they think of that which the Bible teaches as true and that which science teaches as true, in reality they tend to end with the truth of science as more true than the truth of the Bible.
In the earlier passages, up to chapter 5, the word Adam is used with a definite article referring to a specific man. In Genesis 5:1-2 it is used without the article and thus seems better translated as mankind.
Words have become so devalued today that we often have to use cumbersome terms to make what we mean understood. The word fact does not necessarily mean anything anymore. Fact can just mean upper-story religious truth, and therefore we have to use an awkward term like brute fact. In this particular case, we are fortunate because the liberal theologians themselves use the term brute fact for what they don’t mean by facts. The historic Fall is not an interpretation: It is a brute fact. There is no room for hermeneutics here, if by hermeneutics we mean explaining away the brute factness of the Fall. That there was a Fall is not an upper-story statement–that is, it is not in this sense a “theological” or “religious” statement. Rather, it is a historic, space-time, brute-fact, propositional statement. There was time, space-time history, before the Fall, and then man turned from his proper integration point by choice, and in so doing there was moral discontinuity; man became abnormal.
In speaking of facts and brute facts, we are speaking of facts in the space-time sense, that which is open to the normal means of verification and falsification. As I stress in the Appendix to The Church before the Watching World, this does not mean they are then to be taken as sterile facts. These biblical facts are facts in past history, but they have, and should have, meaning in our present existential, moment-by-moment lives.
Furthermore, in speaking of the Bible’s statements as propositional truth we are not saying that all communication is on the level of mathematical formula. There can be other levels (for example, figures of speech or the special force of poetry); but there is a continuity–a unity not a discontinuity–between these “other levels” and a flow of propositions given in normal syntax and using words in their normal definition, and this is a continuity which reason can deal with. Take an example outside of the Bible: Shakespeare’s communication with his figures of speech is a much richer human communication than is mere mathematical formula. The “other levels” (for example, his figures of speech) add enrichment. Yet, if, as in far-out modern prose and poetry, there are only, or almost only, figures of speech, with no adequate running continuity that can be stated in propositional form using normal syntax and words with normal meanings, no one knows what is being said. As a matter of fact, some modern writers and artists deliberately work this way so that this will be the case. Their work becomes only a quarry for subjective experiences and interpretations inside of the head of the reader or viewer. The early chapters of Genesis quickly come to this place if they are read other than as in propositional form using normal syntax and words in their normal meaning. As an example, Paramhansa Yogananda did this in his book Autobiography of a Yogi and most easily turned these chapters into a powerful Hindu tract.