'Chapters 12-50'

Now about Abram. Abram was, like his father, one who left his native land and followed God into the wilderness with no idea where he was going. The thing that separated him from his father was that while his father stopped, he went on and on. That is faith. I forgot to mention it before, but Noah prefigures Abram in his faith and will go on to prefigure the other steps in this process. This process is found in Israel's history, the Anointed One's life, and in the accorded path for each individual's life. The first step is faith. Before the LORD can do anything in us or even begin to fix this world that we've destroyed, we must relearn to trust him like Adam did once. This faith is essential to all other parts, because we cannot be related to someone we don't trust, we cannot obey blindly one we don't trust, and we cannot hope to be filled with Him if we do not trust him to do what is best for us. So it begins with faith. This begins with Abram, but it is important through the three patriarchs and even in the stories of Jacob's sons. Thus the book of Genesis comes to a close, considered by Jews to be part of the Law, but really more a prelude to what the law is trying to do. So next time I will try to begin tackling the meaning of the Law that God gave to Moses.

'Chapters 4-11'

To jump ahead so as to give some hope, this is the gospel, all the hope of paradise that we had before our nasty Fall is available to us right now. All the holes have been patched and the relationship stands at point zero, nay better, because Christ has done a great work. This, to differ with many who call themselves Christians and some who are, is not in some other dimension of Heaven or even in the future. All the hope of freedom is here now. Christ has broken the chains and the sinner walks free. This may seem poetic and grand, as opposed to realistic and analytical, but by nature it must be a little prosaic, because this is not a treatise, but a story. All knowledge of God and indeed everything is bound in a story, but that's another, very important point.
I'm going to try to escape this assumption that you understand this whole thing already. As soon as G-d saw what we had done, He made His first prophecy concerning His Redemption. 'I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.' In this, G-d promises that one day a son of man would rise up against evil and free us. So G-d begins by trying to patch up His relationship with man, before it gets too bad. But, the second man, the first man's son, killed his brother and thus the distance between G-d and man increased. Man became horrible and wretched, but eventually G-d decided that man had gone too far off track. He sought to correct this by starting over. But He found one righteous man who followed Him and thus G-d spared him to start over. This is Noah. God flooded the whole world and killed all but eight people. He did this to wipe the slate clean and give man another chance. There is a whole other theory and idea behind this that I'll discuss later.
So God began by making a deal with that one righteous man. He said that He wouldn't kill all of us and they would try to follow Him. This righteous man was not completely righteous and his family split drastically and man was again in trouble. It was not long before man was getting delusions of grandeur again and trying to make towers to Heaven, forgetting all about the deal they made.
So God began to look for the best man to use to start His rescue attempt. He must have tried dozens, but finally Terah of Ur agreed to leave all the corruption of his people and set out to start a godly people. Terah didn't make it far, but after Terah died, God used a principle that served him very well. He picked the son of one who loved him.
That man's story is for next time. He is the first step in this whole plan to make things right.

'Chapter 3'

This is where I begin to explain where it all went wrong. We all know that the world we live in is less than perfect. This is often referred to as the 'problem of evil' or 'problem of pain.' This was downplayed by Enlightenment thinkers as only a slight deviation. It's important to our philosophy to understand the world, from the first sin, was corrupted and rotten to its very core. How then did good Creation have such a bad Fall? Somehow the very nature of not only the human person, but nature and all created things have been corrupted by mankind's failure to be obedient. The story of this is in Genesis, chapter 3, hence the title of the post. The details are important but dealt with in other places better than here.
You may ask, those who know the story, how did one fruit getting taken from one tree and eaten do all this damage? Two important factors need to be considered to properly answer this question. The natural effects of man's dominion over the earth and the extent to which extraphysical forces exist and affect the world. From observation we can know that 'the best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.' From these observations we should understand why G-d's plan might go equally awry. The fault of Gd's plan was that he had us carry it out. This fault was a necessary fault, as I'll try to show later.
Second an objection to the purely observational. Man was given dominion of the earth. This can be dismissed, if you insist on a materialist worldview, but if you meant to do that, you'd not be reading this. The world has many levels. The idea that magic is just an idea universal in man with no correspondent in reality is absurd and strange to a Romantic. If dragons or a universal flood are represented in the old myths of a huge number of cultures, then maybe they existed in real life, in history or prehistory rather. So magic must have a correspondent in the world. The earth is held together by the properties of physics and but also a magic that links all things. Magic is not some thing that we can command and cast spells. It is supernatural force, spirits, and probably ghosts. The spiritual world exists and we are affected by it. This includes the paranormal. (For more info read 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Coleridge.)
So, by some magical property of the fabric of all that is, man's Fall affected the whole of Creation. I'd like to insert some of the lingo, the jargon of New Romanticism with the word Ea. Ea simply refers to creation, but strips away links to a simply material understanding wound up with that language and imagines the world as two parts interwoven: material and spiritual. Ea is literally that which is. So, Ea is messed up as a result of the breach between men and God. That's enough for one day, but remember to read further to hear the good news.

'Chapters 1-2'

We New Romantics hold the unpopular belief in a good Creation. This means that all of the heavens and the earth were created by G-d, which records say took six days. That may seem crazy to some, but, if you also begin with an understanding that in the beginning no matter or anything existed except G-d, then it isn't so far fetched. If God made the world ex nihilo, as the theologians say it
(which simply means from nothing) then that G-d could easily do it in a second, never mind a week. This belief is monotheistic, that one G-d, separate from that which He created, made all that is.
So, while some, including Plato, Gnostics, and the like, choose to subvert for the sake of or subserviating the material to, as either evil or inferior, the spiritual, New Romantics say that all Creation is good. We get this idea from Genesis 1:31. 'God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.' Don't forget that matter and spirit are equal members of a dualistic universe. That's important. This also means that man and all the animal and plant kingdoms were made good. This means our nature is good and we are intended to be good.
Further, the Scriptures tell us about a time before sin, that mischief and misbehaving that causes so much grief in the world, and lauds it as paradise. We know this sin causes some of our troubles and some suffering, but so often spurious blame is cast on G-d for the state of affairs on this world. But Scripture addresses this issue. This begins to dip into tomorrow's issue, but let it be said simply that, by nature, the world is good and so are the people in it. I hope you don't already think us naive.

'Genesis'

          This is my first post. I do not believe anyone else can claim to be the founder of the New Romantic movement. It turns out Neo-Romanticism does exist, but I prefer to use the English morphology anyway. It seems more modern and more in line with the non-classical movement that Romanticism was. Therefore, we are not Neo but New Romantics. The terms Romanticism and Romantic have a wide semantic range, and can thus be tricky to define. But our movement cannot procede without reference to the English, French, and German Romantics of the first Romantic movement. So with the ambiguous term, Romantic, we begin.

          Romanticism is not just an artistic movement or a philosophical ideal; it is a worldview. I'd like to say that, as I envision it, New Romanticism is primarily a Christian movement as our subtitle probably makes clear, but I do not want to limit it. If anyone sees our general ideas and thinks they work in a Muslim or a Buddhist context, etc., I would be glad to hear it. As I said though, I think it makes most sense in a Christian context. Thus I define us as believing a good Creation, a bad Fall, and a great Redemption. I will explain these terms in posts to come. Thank you all who come to the site.