The Forum > Article Comments > Preaching as art > Comments
Preaching as art : Comments
By Peter Sellick, published 14/12/2005Peter Sellick examines the art of preaching and the preaching of art
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May I suggest that your understanding of the way language works owes much to scientific fundamentalism in which facts are facts and there exists a consensus on what words mean within a very limited field? If everything is judged according to very simple rules of meaning we would never have poetry or literature, let alone theology. The statement that God made the universe is never made in the bible. What we have instead are a collection of legends and the initiation of a history. These cannot be reduced to the materialist concern about who made the world, for this was not the author’s intention. Rather, their intention was to provide an understanding of the ways things were from a human perspective. It was important to indicate that animals were distinct from men and that God was not part of the material world. Likewise it was important to understand the world as natural in opposition to the Babylonian myths of creation in which the world was composed of the God’s body parts. There are all sorts of understandings in the creation narratives that we take for granted. So to reduce them to statements about the origin of the universe is entirely mistaken. May I make a suggestion, read a good commentary on Genesis 1-11 (Westerman is good but a bit long) and you will find a whole world rich in insight.