St Raymond, the tragedy is that you have a comprehension problem in the way you have interpreted what I wrote!
I did not write that Christs OT appearances where those of a human born from an embryo! (where on earth did you get that rubbish from?)
You really need to stop plucking straws out of a packet when discovering biblical theology…especially mine. I take a very wholistic approach to my theology and my doctrines reflect that wholistic approach…which is at odds with any idea that Christ had to incarnate from an embryo in order to appear to Abraham, or wrestle with Jacob, or speak with Moses as two men talking face to face.
Just to clarify a significant difference between Christs visits to earth prior to the Incarnation and his birth, I suggest the following text is crucial in understanding the error:
Phillipians 2:7
Who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, 7butemptiedHimself,takingthe formof a servant,being madeinhuman likeness. 8And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross
Christ did not humble himself to that of a helpless dependant baby at any other point in history…and that is the key to the understanding of the doctrine of the incarnation(Christ’s mortal human birth). It is very different from his OT appearances.
By the time you choose one over the other you have deliberately made the choose that one is better than the other. Hense why you choose it. I don’t know why you and so many others find this concept so difficult not understand here .
In this particular example no. But when talking about real life situations and not some utopia like world 99% of the time one is at least
In my view, in the episodes of the Old Testament you are referring to, it is God or an angel which appears with human look, but the human body they exhibit is not properly a body, and even less Jesus Christ’s body. This is especially clear in the case of the theophany to Abraham and Sarah at the oak of Mamre: Here it is not only the second person, but all the three persons of the Trinity who display human appearance.
When the Bible says that Jesus Christ is before all creation and has been slain from before the beginning of the world, the meaning is that from the eternity perspective of God, the three decisions of creation, incarnation, and redemption, although different, they go together.
However, Jesus Christ himself never intervenes directly with human history before its incarnation about 2023 years ago. Although acting from outside time, God always respects the time order of human history.
Some of the discussion here gets close to accepting the charge some critics make of Christianity being polytheistic. Christ existed from before creation, but as part of the trinune nature of God as we understand it. When God physically appeared in the OT, as in the visitors to Sodom, in the fiery furnace, or wrestling with Jacob, I do not know if that he was manifest in preexisting human bodies or what, but he was God in all cases. Perhaps as the person of Jesus, perhaps not, but it seems not as a body whipped up just for the occasion then zapped out of existence following, as I see it. We often see God manifest in the lives of others, though perhaps not as often as we should. As I write this, I wonder how many heresies I have committed! Not an easy subject, for sure.
You’re still missing the eternal perspective: the only human body God the Son ever had was the one He was incarnate in. He didn’t mash one up for appearances in the Old Testament, He didn’t borrow one somewhere, He used the one that was His, the only one that was ever His. The fact that in terms of our timeline that body hadn’t even been born yet is not even an issue for one who was the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world! or who was the Firstborn of all Creation despite not having been born yet!
The three at Mamre were a type of the Trinity, but they were not all divine – the numbers are wrong! It was the Lord who came with two others, and the Lord who went on by Himself. There’s no reason to conjecture that God the Father and God the Holy Spirit came along as some kind of phantasms.
Where does it say He “always respects the time order of human history”? That’s an assumption that rests on a modern worldview, that the early church didn’t hold; the Fathers note the appearance of the pre-Incarnate Christ at least those seven times in the Old Testament. After all, it isn’t the nature of the Father to take material form, or the nature of the Holy Spirit, it is only the nature of the Son.
He was active from the very beginning, as the apostle tells us: through Him everything was made that has been made, and nothing has been made apart from Him. That means that every nuclear decay, every tunneling electron, every collapsing black hole, every vibrating neutron star, are happening right now because He is doing it. This is no Deistic universe that He set running and from time to time pokes a finger in, it is a universe that He creates anew each moment, and from an eternal perspective that He created all at once, a timeline spread out before Him from beginning to end, each moment fully present to Him despite our human necessity of marching in keeping with time. When He says that He is the Alpha and the Omega, He means right now – “now” the moment in which John heard that, “now” the moment in which we live, and “now” every moment that has been or will be. When He told the Pharisees, “Before Abraham was, I AM”, He seemed to be twisting grammar, but He was making a simple statement that His existence right then with them was no different to Him than His existence with Abraham, that in both places He was (and is, and shall be) the ever-present I AM, so that as He stood speaking with them, from the perspective of eternity He was at that moment talking with Abraham, wrestling with Jacob, etc.
Why alter the tenses of what the Word says? He “is before all Creation” is in the present tense. The writer didn’t set down, “He was present before Creation”, he used the word “is”, because even now at this late date God the Son is at this moment present before Creation in the realm of eternity. He is the Firstborn of all Creation, a status that means He emerged from the non-material realm before anything else did; only once He had given shape to the passage from non-material to material could anything else follow that path.
In grad school we had a “heresy of the week” club, a joking title given to us venting the most bizarre and crazy ideas that had popped into our heads from scripture. We’d set out our ideas, let everyone have a good laugh, occasionally generate in insightful question or two, then decide whose idea was sufficiently rational to qualify as a possible heresy.
Our motto was, “If you can’t abuse scripture, what fun is it?”
There was even a professor from the seminary who dropped in sometimes to hear our ideas and who threw in some of his own – though it took us a while before we realized that he was actually setting us problems in theology and exegesis! crafty man that he was. [He was rather eccentric anyway, pretending to have had odd visions so that he knew what time of day and which day of the week Jesus came upon Nathaniel under the tree, and in fact the very body position Nathaniel had… and whether the wine at the wedding in Cana was a local vintage or imported… both in jest but also to tweak us to climb out of our comfortable worldview(s).]
He even contributed to our apocryphal and quite invented “Gospel According to Saint Pontius”, which had events such as Jesus encountering one too many lepers one day and when told, “Lord, you can heal me, if You will”, saying “I will not! I will not! Get thee hence to Caesar’s free clinic!” plus interesting bits of lore such as that when Jesus told the disciples to cast their nets and they ended up with a big catch, plainly it was Friday…
I’ll say this for our club and that professor: both made us put our minds to work and sharpen our analysis skills!
In Tobit 12:15-22 the angel Raphael himself explains us magnificently what it is all about with such appearances in the Old Testament:
15“I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand ready and enter before the glory of the Lord.” 16 The two of them were shaken and threw themselves face down, for they were afraid. 17 But he said to them, “Do not be afraid; peace be with you. Bless God forevermore. 18As for me, when I was with you, I was not acting on my own will but by the will of God. Bless him each and every day; sing his praises. 19When you were watching me, I was not really eatinganything, but what you saw was a vision.20 So now bless the Lord on the earth and acknowledge God. See, I am ascending to him who sent me. Write down all these things that have happened to you.” And he ascended. 21 Then they stood up and could see him no more. 22 They kept blessing God and singing his praises, and they acknowledged God for these marvelous deeds of his, that an angel of God had appeared to them.
In the same sense, I assume that the state of decay of the world we live in, inherent to creation since the Big Bang, is foreseen by God from the very beginning in case we humans sin. And the reason is, that such state of decay with suffering and the mechanisms of life and death that underpin evolution, facilitates our conversion to God.
The state of “frustration and bondage to decay” referred to in Romans 8:20-21, is in particular encoded in the DNA and become transmitted through reproduction. And in absence of original grace after the first sin in human history, it results into the state of “original sin” we are.
" In Tobit 12:15-22 the angel Raphael himself explains us magnificently what it is all about with such appearances in the Old Testament:
15“I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand ready and enter before the glory of the Lord.” 16 The two of them were shaken and threw themselves face down, for they were afraid. 17 But he said to them, “Do not be afraid; peace be with you. Bless God forevermore. 18 As for me, when I was with you, I was not acting on my own will but by the will of God.* Bless him each and every day; sing his praises. 19When you were watching me, I was not really eating* anything, but what you saw was a vision.20 So now bless the Lord on the earth and acknowledge God. See, I am ascending to him who sent me. Write down all these things that have happened to you.” And he ascended. 21 Then they stood up and could see him no more. 22 They kept blessing God and singing his praises, and they acknowledged God for these marvelous deeds of his, that an angel of God had appeared to them."
The business of God play-acting and so deceiving people into thinking they saw something when they actually didn’t is consistent with Islam but inconsistent with Christianity. It’s something fairly common in late second-temple Judaism resulting from exposure to Persian and similar superstition.
What I find interesting is that Islam affirms that the Qur’an is a direct revelation, entirely from Allah to Mohammad, via the Angel Gabriel (Jibril). As such, if any “falsity” is found in the Qur’an, its status as Allah’s revelation is false.
Consequently, the contradiction between the Qur’an and the New Testament places the Qur’an on shaky ground. If Jesus did not die on the cross, the New Testament is false and Yahweh’s status in Christianity is questionable. On the other hand, if Jesus did die on the cross, the Qur’an–which says Jesus did not die on the cross, but only appeared to–is questionable. Once, the Islamic claim that Qur’an says Jesus did not die on the cross was adamant and deemed a “fact”. For whatever reason, there has been “a softening” of that strong claim: i.e. there are some, in Islam (including, I believe) Shabir Ali) who say that the Arabic wording in the Qur’an is subject to one of several interpretations, and that one of the possible interpretations is that Jesus “could” have died after all.
One of the consequences of the “softening of the position” is that other portions of the Qur’an are equally “debatable” which, IMO, creates “cracks”, so to speak, in the monolithic character of the Qur’an.
This situation enhances the relevance of the Shroud of Turin.
I fully agree that God is never the author of sin!
On the other hand, God made “the creation submitted to frustration” (Romans 8:20) since the very beginning.
Why?
My answer is that God made the creation in such a state of decay (which includes also the “law of entropy” and therefore time!) since the Big Bang for the case that “moral” human beings (i.e. beings “in the image of God”) in the Neolithic would sin, because such a state facilitates that sinners experience their weakness and move them to convert to God. God makes creation in such “a state of frustration” moved by the merciful love to redeem the sinners on earth.
But how can I state that such a state of creation that leads to suffering, death and concupiscence is convenient for sinners to repent?
My statement grounds on the belief that God is all merciful, and therefore, if he lets us on earth in such a state, it is because this is convenient for our salvation. In other words, the fact that God let us sinners on earth in the state of Romans 5:12-21 (the state of “original sin”) means that God wants to redeem the sinners and make them capable of reaching salvation. This entails the important consequence that the circumstances accompanying this state, “physical death” included, should not be considered as something negative, a “punishment” aiming to produce suffering to the sinner, but rather something God wills in order to leading the sinners to repent and making them capable of divine life and eternal happiness, as it is stated in Romans 8:18:
I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
Surely, I do NOT pretend to be capable of demonstrating that even things like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami turn to be beneficial for humankind after all. This will be clear only at the eschaton (the end of time).
Meanwhile we have to accept the mystery, as you very well state:
However, in any case, the author responsible forthe state of decay in creation and the evolutionary mechanisms of death and life is really the first human sinner.
The first 11 chapters of Genesis convey the story of the origins of the world and humankind. From them, 4 chapters (Gen 6-9) are dedicated to the Flood narrative. This means that the Flood story is an important content God wants to reveal us.
My theological-biological explanation assumes that God created the world since the very beginning taken also into account the possibility that humans sin and sinful behavior takes overhand among them.
For such a case God considered important to set a universal judgement in order to make clear, that God let us sinners on earth as an opportunity to repent and return to God’s love.
To avoid killing millions of people, God created humankind according to the following scenario:
At the Neolithic, somewhere in the Near-East (likely Sumer), God created the first humans in the image of God by calling and ordering Homo sapiens creatures to share eternal divine life. Thereby these human beings were called to live loving and respecting each other.
This population multiplied to some hundreds of thousands, who sinned and became corrupted. This is the population who perished in the Flood.
At the same time, all over the earth there were millions of Homo sapiens creatures who were not yet moral beings with sense of accountability. At the end of the Flood God transformed this Homo sapiens population into humankind in the image of God, by calling them to share divine life and writing in their hearts the prohibition of homicide, according to Genesis 9:3, 5-6. Since this moment each Homo sapiens creature on earth is a human person in the image of God.
An important point is that humans in the image of God never lived together with Homo sapiens creatures which were not in the image of God, not even before the Flood: By the very fact of entering a community of humans in the image of God, a Homo sapiens creature became a human being in the image of God (i.e.: ordered to eternal life and called to live loving and respecting others); this is what the passage of the sons of God in Genesis 6: 2 and 4 is telling us. By this means God wanted to protect the sanctity of marriage and human life.
Consider a human being A ordered to eternal life (say from “inside the Garden”) and a Homo sapiens creature B not ordered to eternal life (say from “outside the garden”). Suppose A and B get married and have a child.
Models like Genealogical Adam assume that God orders the child to eternal life, while he does not order B to eternal life.
I think such an assumption is odd: If God orders the child to eternal life at the moment of conception, the more will God order to eternal life also the parent B so that the child can be nurtured and educated in a family where both parents are ordered to eternal life.
In summary, according to my explanation the creation of humankind in the image of God is completed at the end of the Flood, at the moment God proclaims the universal prohibition of homicide “for in the image of God has God made mankind” (Genesis 9:6). The full narrative of creation is Genesis 1-9, and not just Genesis 1-2.
Jesus is called the “firstborn of all Creation”. The term there is a philosophical one that means “opener of the way”, which includes biological firstborns because they are the first to come out of the womb. But in terms of Creation it indicates that Jesus was the One Who made it possible for anything else to be created, which means that all things were created through Him. Thus Jesus is the first creation of God – but that’s awkward because from our point of view it puts the first moment of Creation in the ‘middle’ of the timeline, not at the start. From man eternal point of view, that’s no big deal; it just means that the timeline spread outward from the moment of the Incarnation and once it was complete events in Creation proceeded in the direction time marches.
I say that to preface this: all of Creation, i.e. the whole timeline, could have been made perfect but the moment that happened the contamination of the timeline proceeded not just forward in time but corrupted every moment of the timeline, past and future, so that when creatures able to perceive things around them found the sort of painful, cruel world we live in. Thus God didn’t create anything in a state of decay; the decay was inflicted from one moment of infection and reached back to the first moment of all things.
Which makes this quite true:
" the author responsible forthe state of decay in creation and the evolutionary mechanisms of death and life is really the first human sinner."
I don’t want to offer a short response like this as it’s clear you have thought a lot about this and put much time into it but everything you argue looks entirely ad hoc. Thid is a big problem with old earth creationism in general. It doesn’t fully work and what does is contrived after the fact. Science has forced many of these positions which are not exegetically the best way to read all of early Genesis. I think it’s much simpler and more accurate, especially given all the Mesopotamian parallels and scientific things the Bible gets wrong, to view the literary genre of Genesis 1-11 as myth. I think the rest of Genesis is high literature but certainly not history either though it is more likely to contain it. I know some need more evidence than this but the talking snake alone tells me I’m not dealing with actual history when I read the Garden story. Not to mention dozens of other concerns in early Genesis.
There are actually two full narratives of creation in there. Two contradictory creation stories (e.g. order of creation) followed by two contradictory genealogies and two different flood stories with contradictory details woven together. This is another reason I am not interested in force-fitting a literal Adam into natural history. Genesis 1-11 invites us to go much deport than just taken what’s written as literal history.
For me the punishment of the garden doesn’t even fit the crime. I take Genesis and look at what theology is being taught and what questions I think the author was trying to explain. I compare it to other ANE mythology and glean meaning from there. And in some ways I see the garden story I see as a lamentation for the problem of evil. It probably had special significance furring the exile as well. I don’t know what to make of Paul in Romans but I’m not forcing myself to believe in a literal Adam and Eve on that basis. I think Paul just took that for granted as did most Jews of the time and used the story to emphasize the saving grace of Jesus on the cross.
We also probably have very different approaches to scripture and my end up just talking past one another.