Can i suggest that there is a big problem with your theory here…
Do you honestly believe that God came down and was born a baby, died on the cross, was ressurected, and then ascended back into heaven?
Isnt that all a physical impossibility?
Have you ever seen the devil?
Do you really believe that a man who rose into heaven will oneday come back in the clouds of heaven and that all the good people will rise up into the sky to join him…incl those who have been dead and rotted away to mere bones in the ground? What about those whove been eaten by animals, or burned and their ashes scattered? Are these not physical impossibilities?
Next time you are on a high hill or mountain, take a look at the horizon…do you honestly think a man can come down from out of the sky and every eye will see him all at once?
Yours is an illogical argument of faith…as is Noahs flood and yet there is a vast amount of evidence for the flood…the biggest being the huge amounts of sedimentry deposits, fossil fuel deposits all around the globe, enormous amounts of evidence for catastrophic flooding…the argument is really over time not that there was a catastrophic event at some point. There are a number of secularists who claim a large meteorite hit the earth at some point in the past, the impact causing a massive tidal surge and dust cloud, volcanic activity etc. Even if that were true, wouldnt you as a TEist make the connection God must have caused that to happen? Then the question even for you is, why did a loving God allow an uncontrolled event to wipe out almost all life on earth and practially destroy the planet…and yet His word says He plans on doing it again (read the Old Testament book of Daniel, then go and read Revelation).
Something doesnt add up with your theory here. The bible preaches global aniihilationism due to sin.
Not in the Hebrew it doesn’t, and probably not in the Greek – the best rendition is “the known world”.
Heck, an argument could be made that the Flood only covered the parts of the Earth where the Nephilim lived, since they are portrayed as the source of the upwelling of wickedness.
Besides which, they didn’t know the Earth was a globe. If you want to be an actual literalist, you have to maintain that the Flood covered the Earth-disk and the waters backed up against the bronze dome.
At that time I had never heard of worldview, but came to understand that by “worldview” they meant “the basic way of interpreting things and events that pervade a culture so thoroughly that it becomes a culture’s concept of reality—what is good, what is important, what is sacred, what is real.
The problem for the common reader is that we have little or no knowledge of the translator or the texts they used… Probably 99% of Christians have not even queried the validity of the texts they read or use.
Christ talked about us needing to have the faith of a child. Intellect is often detrimental to faith
If you haven’t even seen the discrepancies between modern knowledge and Scripture you won’t worry about it.
Jesus’s command to become like little children is NOT an anti-intellectual manifesto. To portray it as if it were is to take it right out of context and miss the point that He was actually making. Here are the relevant verses—Matthew 18:1-5:
At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”
He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”
Jesus’s command to become like little children was in response to a specific question that His disciples were constantly bickering about: “Who is the greatest?” His point about little children was to tell them to stop thinking in terms of jockeying for power and position. Children are anything but in charge. They are accountable to everyone and responsible for no-one. They have rules and restrictions that adults don’t. They lack rights that adults enjoy. They have to go to bed early. They are not allowed to drive or to vote. They have to go to school. All in all, they are Just Another Brick In The Wall.
Describing intellect as “often detrimental to faith” is to turn faith into the glorification of gullibility and wilful ignorance. The Bible tells us that we are to move beyond childish thinking and on to a mature faith, informed and tempered by wisdom (e.g. Hebrews 6:1-3). We are also told elsewhere (e.g. 1 John 4:1) not to believe every spirit, but to test the spirits to see which are from God. Pastors and Bible teachers should be teaching us to exercise faith and intellect together in ways that complement each other and build each other up, not to view them as some sort of dichotomy where you can only have one but not the other.
Just as it is harder for a rich person to reach the kingdom of Heaven, Intellect can be a hindrance as well. This is not claiming that you cannot use intellect if you have it, just as Jesus was not necessary claiming that if you have money you can’t be a Christian. It is about using what you have. However, there are those who try and bamboozle others with their learning and intellect and in doing so cause more harm than good. Like minds and all that.
Recently several preachers at my church have tried to emphasise the way the Christmas story has been exaggerated or enhanced as if they are trying to debunk the Nativity. For what purpose? It wasn’t clear. It was more like information for information’s sake. Criticism for criticism’s sake serves no purpose. Likewise honing in on apparent conflicts between science and scripture. Rectifying it may be easy for you, but it can cause a stumbling block to others and that is something Christ warns against.
It is similar to the journalistic sensationalism approach. Sometimes it is better not to know but once you do know then you have to resolve it. Ignorance really can be bliss. It is only when you try and brush away what you know, or put your head in the sand that it becomes a problem
Intellect in itself cannot be a stumbling block. Paying attention to and valuing the wrong things is what causes people to stumble. Maybe folks with higher intellect just have more things that can distract them from what they should be paying attention to. Those who vaunt their own prowess and opinions are only obvious examples of that (gifted with intellect or not ; - ).
Whether you fall back on Paul or the OED, faith involves ignoring reason and knowledge. Yes we can rationalise our faith and even justify it to ourselves, but at the end of the day the basis of faith has nothing to do with intellect and even less to do with knowledge.
IQs are measured by our ability to reason and think laterally. Both these things are in contention with faith.
If we take the bible at face value fiath is almost certain, but we can’t. Why, because of what we know or think we know! So we start reasoning and thinking and constructing this theory or that doctrine. We have a need for Scirture to be accurate and authorative, but we see flaws or inconsistencies and our need for perfection kicks in.
I have been accused of attacking Scripture, disbelieving Scripture, abusing Scripture and so on. Scripture does not need defending. It is what it is. It functions. It is only us Christians that muddy the waters.
So is life but our capacity to live is not always under our control. Our Intellect is a gift from God, to use or not, but it directly affects the way we think, and choose and rationalise.
I do not think that faith is something that God controls. Such an idea is abhorrent. It smacks of Calvinism or predestination. It gives God a control that I do not think He wields (whether He could or not).It goes against all views of freedom of choice, and freedom in general.
I would say that scripture is 100% true in the story that it tells, not necessarily every detail. For example, the Bible is not intended to be a cosmology textbook, so it is not a problem that some verses seem to suggest a flat earth since that wasn’t the intent of the Biblical authors. I also think that the truth of scripture is sometimes not recognized because of gaps in our knowledge. I would agree that the evidence for a global flood is lacking and I do not expect that belief to be vindicated anytime soon. The idea of a global flood also does not necessarily fit the Biblical context either. My rejection of the idea that you have to throw out logic and reason to be a Christian is why I reject the omphalos hypothesis, that God created the universe to look old. The idea that you can come to the wrong conclusion about the origin of creation just by doing honest research is anti-intellectual and contradicts the character of God as being a God of truth.
All of that had nothing to do with intellect itself being a stumbling block, but more supporting my point about what we pay attention to as the real problem.
Well, I’m not sure–my kids are not born perfect, I’m afraid (must be my side of the family). I would certainly say that juxtaposed next to the power holders, the adults, they are humble–but among each other, they can be just as much stinkers as we are :).
Agreed. We have a kindergartner in the house while my daughter’s family is in transition, and he is pretty much all about himself. But amazingly, kids who start out pretty much amoral turn out to be functional adults. So, I don’t think that verse is about behavior at all, but more about their humility and openness to change, i.e. their moldability as @jammycakes suggested.
I guess I should have fleshed that out more. My thinking is that they aren’t (yet) “habitual offenders”, they’re opportunistic. Adults have made sin a habit, kids just dabble.
