Abstracts Category : Other

Seeing Godsvoice in creation : a visio-spatial interpretation of Genesis1

by Annelien Rabie-Boshoff

Contemporary Christians, evangelicals in particular,find it problematic to formulate and understand the relationshipbetween the Christian faith tradition and natural science, withthe result that they struggle in their understanding of thecreation story in Genesis 1. The purpose of this study was tobring Christian theology and the science of linguistics intodialogue with each other in an attempt to understand the biblicalcreation story in modern-day terms. The motivation for the study isbased on the belief and understanding that within the paradigm ofthe dialogue model disciplines other than theology, likelinguistics, can bring insights to the world of the Bible and viceversa. The hypothesis for this thesis is based on thepresupposition that Gods voice, believed to be inaudible sacredsound as Pretorius (2011:1-7) envisions it, can indeed be seen byhumans as it becomes visible in creation, and interpreted in a waysimilar to the way deaf people communicate. This interpretationfinds support from insights gained from the world of the Deaf andthe basic principles of Sign, the language used to communicatewithin the deaf community. Two significant characteristics of Signthat strongly resonate with the picture of the natural worldemerging from Genesis 1, are its unique and complex use ofthreedimensional space, and its rich modulation in time. This isexplained in eloquent terms by renowned neurologist Oliver Sackswho says that, what occurs linearly, sequentially, temporally inspeech, becomes simultaneous, concurrent, multileveled in Signand what looks so simple is extraordinarily complex and consistsof innumerable spatial patterns nested, three-dimensionally, ineach other (Sacks 1991:88). These insights were fundamental inthe development of the Divine Sign Language Model (DSL), which hasproven to be a fruitful model to use in an effort to understandwhat it could possibly mean when the Bible talks of God speakingor of Gods voice. Through the application of the DSL Model, tenbasic image-concepts have been identified in Genesis 1, which formthe foundation to a relational theology of Genesis 1.Advisors/Committee Members: Buitendag, Johan (advisor), Rinquest, Lindsay (coadvisor).