jpm,
Yes, but the difference is that the account in Genesis is presented as history. This is evident in the genealogies that are delineated with the account. Do you believe that Adam was the first man in the world? Rather, were other men or perhaps somewhat simian creatures, midway between man and ape, present with Adam? Was Adam such a creature?
That is highly debatable.
The foundations of the Christian Bible is not Genesis. It is the person and work of Jesus Christ who entered the story of Israel, the people whom God chose to act out his story in redemption history. The Bible didn’t found Christianity, Jesus did.
I’m curious what perspective you are coming at this investigation from? Did you grow up in a fairly fundamentalist church or have you pretty much always been a skeptic? (Or something else, I’m not trying to put you in a box, it would just be helpful to understand what general worldview(s) you grew up with or have already rejected or are considering possibly adjusting.)
Christy,
Thanks for responding. You say that it’s highly debatable that it’s presented as history. If it’s not history, then why were genealogies included with the account?
And yes, a foundation of the Christian bible IS Genesis. Without the Old Testament, there is no need for Christ whatsoever. For instance, I’m well-aware of Isaiah 53 for instance and its significance. But wait, why should I accept that portion of the Old Testament as evidence for Christ’s legitimacy when so much of the Old Testament is fiction as you believe? You earlier said that truth and fact are not synonymous, but this is demonstrably false. Facts ARE truths, and truths are facts.
I was indeed reared in what you might describe as a fundamentalist Christian background, but it’s not really relevant to my questions.
Hi Joseph, welcome to the Forum! I hope you’ll find your time spent here to be fruitful.
There have been others on this Forum claiming that “history” instead of Jesus is the foundation of the Bible. However, there are a number of biblical (!) references that contradict this claim.
In John 1, we read that Jesus Himself is the Word of God. The Bible revolves around Him from the first page to the last. If someone loves to repeat the catch phrase “the Bible is the Word of God”, then that person must concede that the Bible (including Genesis) is founded on Jesus Christ in every sense of that word.
In Colossians 1, we read:
16 For in Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through Him and for Him. 17 He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
If everything holds together in Jesus, even history and the Bible itself do so…
As far as I know, nobody at BioLogos or affiliated with BioLogos would say that the Bible is “fictional”. Point 1 of the BioLogos belief statement entails the following:
We believe the Bible is the inspired and authoritative word of God. By the Holy Spirit it is the “living and active” means through which God speaks to the church today, bearing witness to God’s Son, Jesus, as the divine Logos, or Word of God.
It’s just that we have to discern the intention of the biblical writers from the texts. They were inspired by the Holy Spirit to transmit essential teachings to the people in ways that were understandable (i.e., fit with their context). That means that non-essential aspects of the narratives might be transmitted in stylized fashion, or even utilized to emphasize the points of the teaching.
As for your claim that only historical facts are truths and vice versa , that’s a very limited (and even unbiblical) view of the truth. Think of all the parables of Jesus, transmitting truths with meanings that extend way beyond the literal occurrences. In the person of Jesus, we even come to understand that the Truth Itself is a person. A person can’t be reduced to historical facts, because a person is part of a larger story. Of course, the historicity of our faith is valuable. But it shouldn’t replace the foundation of our faith: the personal relationship with the Word of God, Jesus Christ. The Bible is the Word of God because it reflects who Jesus is.
Casper,
Thank you for responding. Did Jesus Christ believe in the literal interpretation of the flood in Genesis?
Hi Joseph,
I myself belief that that the account of Noach actually took place in human history. However, the text doesn’t seem to demand a global flood in the modern sense of that word (“eretz” = land, region).
Whether Jesus had a similar position is impossible to argue based on the Gospels. In any case, He did not place any emphasis on “literal historical aspects” of Genesis. He quoted once from Genesis uniquely versus 34 unique quotes from Exodus, Deuteronomium, Isaiah, and the Psalms (see this article). Even that one quote was only used by Him for emphasizing the sanctity of marriage as created by God. I fully affirm that the marriage between husband and wife was established by God.
Even if Jesus would have had a different position on some aspects of Genesis, the Scriptures also teach the doctrine of kenosis: the self-emptying of the Son of God in the flesh. This is a very well-established doctrine accepted by all mainline Christian denominations. One of the implications is that Jesus in the flesh was not omniscient on every single topic. This is shown for example in the passage where He was unable to say when the End of Times would come. So even if He believed that the sky were a solid dome, this would not be any problem. He would simply be operating within His own Jewish context, efficiently communicating with His contemporaries. So there is no reason to assume that Jesus would be any more knowledgeable on the natural history of creation than all other Jews that lived during His time. Especially since none of that was actually relevant for His salvation ministry.
Don’t you think that If he did, and if it was important that we all approach to the Bible in that way, then He would have taught us to emulate these specific literal approaches to the law and prophets? Indeed his disciples were stubbornly literal about a lot of things, but instead of commending them for their surface treatment of words, we find Jesus disabusing them of the habit, drawing them into the deeper meaning of his claims.
Well, I suppose we could get into a big philosophical discussion about this, but to explain myself, in my usage, a “fact” is an indisputable logical or scientific proposition about reality. “Truth” is a broader category for the “really real” and includes things we come to know through experience, imagination, revelation and other sources of knowledge besides reason and observation. Many “truths” are disputable or nuanced and depend on your view of reality, whereas facts can be proven true or false.
So I do not believe the words are synonymous or that there is mutual entailment, they are a hyponym/hypernym pair. A fact is a kind of truth like a dog is a kind of animal. If something is a fact, it entails it is also a truth, but to claim you can therefore negate q and entail p is a logical fallacy. (If a creature is an animal, it doesn’t entail it is a dog.) The entailment only holds if you negate the consequence and make it the premise. (If something is not a truth, it is therefore not a fact.)
When you say “history” it is obvious you mean objective recording of objective facts. That is not what “history” means in many cultures. Genealogies play a role in many cultures of marking a text as authoritative and legitimate. Yes, the genealogies in Genesis tie the narratives to the history of Israel. That is partially why I believe they talk about people who really lived. But it is an unwarranted leap to say that because the narratives include characters who lived in history, therefore we should read and interpret them as we read modern history, with an expectation that the composers were following our modern conventions for describing reality or that their reasons for composing the histories were simply to accurately inform posterity of what happened. Even in our own day, histories are told from a perspective and serve many cultural purposes other than (or in addition to) recording facts and informing. And the ANE motivations and conventions were obviously different than our own. The numerology of the recorded life spans is one example.
My sympathies, you probably have a lot of baggage to unpack. I think it is relevant to how you understand Christians who answer your questions. Over the course of many discussions with people who have grown up in this subculture, I have noticed that there seems to be an awful lot of “either it has to be this, and if it is not, it must be this” kind of thinking. A huge percentage of these assertions are false choices and don’t represent the way other Christians (who in my opinion have a more sane and healthy way of approaching God, truth, and the Bible) think about an issue. So it is something for you to be aware of when you are trying to understand what people here are saying. Isaiah 53 is a case in point. The idea that the main reason it is in the Bible is to act as an apologetic tool to prove the legitimacy of Christ seems to me to be a weirdly exclusive way to approach the text. “Either the OT is fact or the OT is fiction” is another false choice that is pretty incomprehensible to me.
This challenge presumes that “explanation” (with all the modern scientific trappings of that word) is what I am aiming for. Understanding is a more realistic aim, I think. And that will get derailed if we aren’t first willing to consider what words and claims meant to the audience of that day, such as “earth”.
Casper,
Thanks for responding. Do you give credence to the genealogies shown in Genesis as well? Personally, I have a very hard time believing that the account in Genesis describes a local flood when the impression of the scale of the event does not comport with this interpretation.
I’ll consider your perspective on kenosis more.
Mervin,
Thanks for responding. Please give me examples of what you believe would be literal approaches to the law and prophets.
I used to mean pretty much one thing by “literal”, but I’ve since become aware that there is a genuine literal sense that we modern readers (whether creationist or not) have largely lost and would do well to recover. But I’ll get back to that in a moment, since you asked for an example in the sense I just used it.
An example of “literal” among Jesus disciples and would-be disciples would be when he spoke of eating his flesh (in John), and as a result many were confused or disgusted. Or when he warned his disciples to “beware of the yeast of the pharisees”, and they launch into a discussion thinking they had forgotten to bring bread. In some cases Jesus puts a stop to it right away and explains the actual truth to them (which had nothing to do with the literal events --those descriptive words being merely vehicles for the real meaning).
The same kinds of literalism may rear up in modern times as well when we, say, hear a story in Sunday school about Jonah and the big fish and we think: “Cool! Here are some really confounding things God can do --making storms come and go and sustaining a man in a fish for three days!” But then on deeper reading we discover the story isn’t about those things (naturalism vs. supernaturalism) at all, but about something entirely different. The ancients didn’t need convincing that gods or God could do amazing things (that’s our modern agenda that drives that skepticism); that would have been a “no-duh!” for them … and when we realize that we can go on to plum the story for its greater (and real) messages about our own stubborn reticence to bring good news to others not like us, and our reactions when even our enemies repent and do things we don’t expect.
Or of course, the elephant in the room here would be our literalism in thinking that all words used in both Genesis creation accounts (or usually just the first account) must correspond only to literal meanings as they would be understood in a newspaper report.
The second form of literalism is to try to understand the accounts literally as the original audience would have understood them, with their own questions and agendas being addressed. Sometimes that might coincide with the first form of literalism I used and gave examples for above, but scholars (including devout Christian ones) have been able to show that quite often there is little or no correspondence of agendas from then to now, and hence our misreading of the texts now. As a student of scriptures myself, I want to recover that higher and real literalism as opposed to today’s literalism which I think is ironically driven by enlightenment agendas.
It can be freeing to just try to read Scriptures on their own terms (after studying to know something about the agendas of those times), and to put aside the fortress mentality of reading to buttress against those who want to challenge this or that of our own cherished understandings.
If you want to say the Bible scribe made a MISTAKE in thinking the Flood was a GLOBAL one … fine.
But there is NOTHING about the Biblical version of the flood story that can be interpreted as regional flood.
I will agree that regional floods INSPIRED the story … but it is not a story ABOUT a regional flood. No regional flood ever reached the Ararat mountain range.
8 posts were split to a new topic: George and Jon’s scholarly quibbles about the Flood and what happens when you die
Casper,
Thanks for responding. The major problem with what you say is this:
The problem here is that both allegory and parable are indeed fictional, despite whatever truths that they’re intended to transmit. Don’t mistake that I’m asserting that all the claims in the Christian bible are false because I am not. But the fact of the matter is this. Either the accounts in Genesis are literal, allegorical or mistakes. If they’re not literal, then they’re by definition fiction, despite whatever truths they’re intended to transmit. If the foundations of Christianity in the Old Testament are fiction, then by what rationale do you accept the legitimacy of the remainder of the Christian bible?
Again, the distinction between the parables of Christ in my mind here is that it was plain, even if in immediate retrospect, that these WERE parables and by definition fiction. Certainly there was truth transmitted through these parables, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t by definition fiction. That kind of fiction presents no difficulty whatsoever since they were INTENDED to be fiction. To repeat, the problem here is that the accounts in Genesis were clearly intended to be historical.
What you say is mostly true, but you’re making a distinction where one does not exist. It reminds me of those, mostly atheist, who try to make the distinction between belief, faith and giving credence to fact concluded by empirical science or rational thought. The motivation, of course, is to distinguish themselves from their opponents, but it’s meaningless.
You seem to be doing the same, only here your opponent is the difficulty in reconciling what you believe are (fictional) mythologies with the truth of the Christian bible. You’re giving fact the character of tangible existence while you believe that (broader) truths are more abstract.
If you find the formal definitions of both words, you’ll find that they’re very nearly entirely synonymous. Facts are truths, and truths are facts.
The accounts in Genesis were clearly intended to be historical, probably with the exception of Genesis 1.
[quote=“Christy, post:28, topic:4738, full:true”]
My sympathies, you probably have a lot of baggage to unpack. I think it is relevant to how you understand Christians who answer your questions. Over the course of many discussions with people who have grown up in this subculture, I have noticed that there seems to be an awful lot of “either it has to be this, and if it is not, it must be this” kind of thinking.[/quote]
Thank you for your sympathy, but it’s entirely unnecessary. I’m simply interested in the truth behind all this. I’ve considered both the perspectives of young-earth creationists and those more aligned with BioLogos. The real crux of the disagreement of course is deep time and universal common ancestry, the proposition that evolutionary theory accounts for the origins of all biota on the face of the planet including mankind. I have absolutely no a priori commitment to either the perspective of young-earth creationists or theistic biological evolutionists because of worldview. Maybe young-earth creationists are right. Maybe theistic evolutionists are right. Maybe they’re both wrong. Personally, I’ve grown to become very skeptical of evolutionary theory where in the past it really wasn’t relevant to me. Questions of deep time are related but not necessarily so. But this is another discussion entirely of course.
I think there’s a problem with the way you’re using the words “literal” and “fiction”. When the prophets saw visions, what they saw wasn’t literal. But does that make their visions fiction? I think you’re better off drawing a distinction between a literal reading and a natural reading.
No, this is not so. I’m simply defining them by the meanings of the words themselves. Of course visions that were experienced by prophets were literally true if they truly happened. What you mean is that visions experienced by prophets wouldn’t be perceived by anyone else but the prophets themselves.
Ok so when you say “literal” what do you mean? What’s a “literal” reading of this?
Numbers 14:
18 ‘The LORD is slow to anger
No what I mean is the visions experienced by prophets included creatures which don’t exist, like beasts with seven heads and ten horns. Are those literal beasts or is the prophecy just a fiction?
So I have a question for you, Joseph. When you walk into a library, do you avoid the entire fiction section as a plague of lies? I.e. Are all our libraries divided into a “Truth section” (nonfiction) and a “Only gullible dummies will come over here” (fiction) section? Because most books in the fiction section will not come with explicit labels that “this is fiction” --in fact many of them go on to spin a yarn just as if it really happened. Just like Jesus is not recorded as having begun every parable with the warning “now this is only a parable I’m about to tell you, okay? …this stuff didn’t really happen… so feel free to ignore these stories as the 2nd-class fictions that they are.”
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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