Koinonia

Bruce Waltke - New Paper on Evolutionary Process

Bruce Waltke has a new paper posted on The Biologos Foundation website, "Barriers to Accepting the Possibility of Creation by Means of an Evolutionary Process."

Download the full PDF here. (Posted here with the permission of the BioLogos Foundation.)

Other scholarly essays in the BioLogos collection can be found here.

The Creation of Humankind in the Ancient Near East

We are all familiar with the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis two and their creation stands in contrast to the scientific theories of human origins in western culture. We will see as we look at the comparative data that the information offered in the biblical text would have been very comfortable in the ancient Near Eastern environment, though several noticeable differences are observable.

Creation of Humankind in the Ancient Near East

It is common that some part of deity is used in the creation of humankind. Although there is little information on the creation of humankind in Egyptian literature, the breath of the deity or his tears represents the endowment from the deity.¹

Don't Stop Believing 4 of 5: Christians, the Economy and Plato by Michael E. Wittmer

I used to laugh at the advertisements for no-money down, interest only, adjustable rate mortgages. Who in their right mind would take out a loan they could never begin to pay back? Even worse, who in their right mind would loan to such borrowers? Now I realize that this was no laughing matter, for these foolish loans are bankrupting our economy.

The bankers who wrote these bad loans thought they had covered their backsides by cutting them into pieces, combining these pieces with parts of other bad mortgages, and then selling them as securities. And just to be safe, they then covered these bad securities with fake insurance, called credit default swaps. What could go wrong?

To add insult to injury, the masterminds behind this plan "earned" tens of millions of dollars, even as they were being fired from their bankrupt companies—which

we taxpayers now must prop up with our own money (and that of our children and grandchildren).

Hebrew Corner 3: "create (bara')" by John H. Walton

We have been discussing in previous postings how there are Hebrew words that still are in need of careful study to discern their particular nuances. Often these words are ones that occur only a handful of times and have not attracted much attention. But sometimes we might also find need to study words that occur more frequently and are fairly significant.

One such word is the Hebrew bara’ (“to create”). In cases like this one we not only have to ask what English word we should use to translate it, but also what the Israelite audience, who used these words, would have meant by using this word. That is, does the concept of “creation” have the same meaning to an Israelite as it would to us? If we are interested in the face value meaning (sometimes referred to as the literal meaning) of a word for interpretation, we cannot be content with studying the English word “create”—we must study the face value meaning of the Hebrew word bara’.

The verb bara’ occurs about fifty times in the Old Testament. As often noted, deity is always either the subject or the implied subject (in passive constructions) of the verb. It can therefore be confidently asserted that the activity is inherently a divine activity and not one that humans can perform or participate in.

It is of interest that few commentators discuss the objects of the verb, but this is the most important issue for our analysis. Since we are exploring what constitutes creative activity, then the nature of that which has been created is of utmost significance.

The following chart provides a comprehensive list of the objects of bara’: