Siecienski is a professor of religion.
Florovsky was a theologian.
Philip Schaff was a thologian.
Nicholas Sagovsky is a theologian.
Irenaeus was a bishop.
Of your supposed “professional historians,” only one - Francis Dvornik - was a historian - but (i) he was also a priest, (ii) he’s been dead for more than 50 years, and (iii) you haven’t cited him saying the church was undivided.
I doubt I know better than professional historians, but since you aren’t citing professional historians, you don’t know what professional historians know.
No it doesn’t go to pitch blackness. They are in the kitchen so the light just goes from bright to less bright to dark.
Pretty sure uninterrupted hours isn’t required.
The glow isn’t permanent. The portion of the sky over your head will go dark as soon as the sun goes down. The light doesn’t wrap around the earth. You never responded to what I said about Mie scattering. You can observe it today. At sunrise or sunset go outside and look at a cloud, like a cumulus or cumulonimbus. If it is tall enough the top of the cloud will be illuminated by the sun while the lower portions are not. The tops will show white, that is Mie scattering, and more importantly the lower portions will be dark. So even with a solid overcast, it will go dark when the sun goes down.
Without a source that backs this up I am afraid I can’t accept it.
Call it pagan if you wish, but it is what the early Israelites believed.
Actually my interlinear gives it as “on the face of the firmament of the heavens”. Your translation will be different of course. From the paper that I linked,
A Google Scholar search turned up a ton of papers that all agree. A scholarly source from the paper I linked is The firmament and the water above which I am sure you will not agree with.
Now you are down to microscopic purely mineral crystals. Not very life like. Like I said, just go to atoms.
A lineage of humans, not single cell life. But no problem, lets just redefine “human”.
Your claim that I have not cited any professional historians is factually false and incorrect. You are also creating a false dichotomy between historians and theologians, as though someone trained in theology could not simultaneously be a professional historian of Christianity.
1. Norman Tanner
Norman Tanner was Professor of Church History at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. An academic review published by Oxford University Press explicitly describes him as “a leading church historian.”
In The Church in Council: Conciliar Movements, Religious Practice and the Papacy from Nicaea to Vatican II (I.B. Tauris, 2011, pp. 162–163), Tanner refers to the first seven ecumenical councils as: “the seven councils of the undivided church”
Crucially, in the very same paragraph, he acknowledges: “Yet there were major splits and schisms before that time”
He proceeds to discuss the Arians, Nestorian churches, and churches that separated following Chalcedon.
This directly addresses your objection. Tanner is perfectly aware of the major divisions of the first millennium, yet he still considers the expression undivided Church historically appropriate when referring to the period before the fundamental East–West schism.
2. Enrico Morini
Enrico Morini taught the history of Eastern Christianity at the University of Bologna, including within its History degree programme.
In his 2011 essay Continuità e rottura: i due volti del concilio Vaticano II, he explicitly states: “non sono un teologo” And: “Per vocazione sono piuttosto uno storico.”
In English: “I am not a theologian” and “By vocation, I am rather a historian.”
In the same essay, he describes the first millennium as that of the: “Chiesa dei sette Concili, ancora indivisa.”
That is, “the Church of the seven Councils, still undivided.”
So here we have someone who explicitly identifies himself as a historian, taught the subject at a major public university, and nevertheless describes the Church of the first millennium as undivided.
3. Philip Schaff
Your description of Philip Schaff as merely a theologian is also completely misleading.
Schaff was Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary and a major figure in the development of church history as an academic discipline in America.
The Enciclopedia Italiana published by Treccani describes him as both a theologian and a historian. These categories are not mutually exclusive.
4. Francis Dvornik
The objections that Dvornik was a priest and is now deceased have no bearing whatsoever on his qualifications as a historian.
I agree, however, that citing Dvornik’s credentials alone would not establish that he personally used the expression undivided Church. That requires a verified passage from his work.
LThe point of the matter is this: I have never argued that the first millennium was entirely free from heresy, schism, or ecclesiastical conflict.
My argument is that the expression undivided Church is an established historical designation for the period preceding the definitive separation between Eastern and Western Christianity.
Tanner’s work is important here: as he explicitly acknowledges the very schisms you invoke and nevertheless uses the term.
Therefore, merely listing the Arians, Nestorians, or non-Chalcedonian churches does not refute the historical usage of undivided Church. Those divisions are already known to, and discussed by, the historians who employ that designation.
Claiming that professional historians do not use it (or that those who do are simply ignorant of the early schisms) is demonstrably false.
The oceans are “the waters below”.
Have you even bothered to check the context of Genesis 1 - 11? You’re so determined to make it talk your version of modern science you’re turning the text into something it isn’t.
In the context of number, yes. There is no such context in early Genesis.
“Made from dust” was a standard ANE trope that meant mortality.
When God says we are dust and to dust we shall return, He isn’t talking about number, He’s talking about death.
You don’t get to butcher language by changing its meaning to fit your scheme.
No, it isn’t, it’s saying that God took the dead, least useful material there was and made something exalted – His own image.
It’s exactly an alien worldview – it’s modern science trying to put on a Genesis cloak. And it makes you look ridiculous because your whole scheme rests on throwing the actual language into the trash.
Elohim isn’t God except when the context makes it clear, and even then He is just ‘the’ elohim, first among many. All the angels are elohim, and all are spirit.
The only way to get around the presence of elohim pointing to a spiritual realm is to make YHWH-Elohim material.
You can only get that by imposing a MSWV onto the text.
You just destroyed your idea that the crust of the eretz is actually part of the heavens.
I’m trying to get across to you the linguistic reality of ancient Hebrew. You’re starting with an assumption that the text really talks modern science and using that to conclude that the text talks modern science.
That is circular reasoning and it is just YEC in camo – a demand that God somehow engaged in possession of the writers and made them write things alien to their thinking.
Only if you insist that it has to talk modern science.
You claim to be following the Hebrew, and you make claims about what it could communicate. So please – how many years did you study the ANE context of ancient Hebrew, and how many years did you study Hebrew?
If you were you wouldn’t consign the concepts in the language to the trash.
No, it’s part of the context of the writing, whether you think it came from Moses, or before Moses, or Hezekiah, or the Exile.
You’re ripping the conceptual context out of the writing.
No, I’m sticking with the meaning of the word.
You love to claim you’re just using the meanings that are there, but then you throw out any meaning that is inconvenient. That’s what happens when you try to pound the text into talking in a different worldview.
Exactly – it isn’t in the text, it isn’t in the ANE concepts, it’s something you made up due to having the same basic premise as YEC, that the text really talks modern science.
I’m not turning raqia into anything, I’m telling you what the word meant and what the context says. And it doesn’t come from any idea of a “campfire story”, it comes from holding that God treated His chosen writers with respect by letting them express themselves in their own terms.
YECers generally don’t bother to even look at the “historical seriousness of the biblical text”, they assume that God overrode the personalities of the ancient writers and used them like puppets to make the equivalent of modern news reports. That shows no respect for the text whatsoever.
YEC ignores that question and just assumes that they are right to demand that God had to speak in a MSWV.
And ancient writers referred to the surface of the sea as being like brass – it looked like beaten metal to them. This goes, BTW, back to at leas 800 BC.
Nor did I say you hadn’t cited any - that’s a misrepresentation - since I acknowledged that Dvornik was a historian, albeit a deceased one.
I am not. I checked the careers of the people you cited, and found they were[1] professional theologians, not professional historians.
If you have evidence that any of them held a position as a historian, present it.
You did not cite Tanner or Morini. Introducing them now as if they were somehow relevant to your earlier post is dishonest.
But it’s not nearly as dishonest as quote-mining.
Tanner actually wrote this:
We sometimes speak of the first seven ecumenical councils, from Nicaea I in 325 to Nicaea II in 787, as the seven councils of the undivided church inasmuch as they took place before the most fundamental of all schisms, that between the churches of East and West beginning in the eleventh century. Yet there were major splits and schisms before that time. Arius and his sympathisers rejected Nicaea I, Nestorian churches broke away after Ephesus, various Monophysite churches after Chalcedon - the most important being the Coptic church in Egypt - and many other smaller divisions occurred.
Even within the churches that remained in fundamental communion during this first millennium, there were tensions and schisms: periods of formal schism between the Eastern and Western churches, notably while Acacius (471-89) and Photius (858-92) were patriarchs of Constantinople; the persistence of Arianism within the Western church until the ninth century; and many other difficulties. Indeed, especially in proportion to the numbers of Christians - under a hundred million for the first millennium, over a billion today - the church appears at least as quarrelsome during its first millennium as during the second. For strong language it is hard to rival the exchanges between theologians of Alexandria and of Antioch around the time of the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon or that in Photius’s encyclical letter of 867 denouncing the bishop of Roma and portraying Westerners as ‘savage beasts’.
Tanner does not refer to the first seven ecumenical councils as: “the seven councils of the undivided church”. He notes that this is a common but inaccurate description.
I did not say he was “merely” a theologian. That is more dishonesty on your part.
After he was first “the chair of theological encyclopedia and Christian symbolism till 1873, of Hebrew and the cognate languages till 1874, of sacred literature” [source]. Omitting his earlier, much longer career as a theologian is yet more dishonesty. You also omitted to mention that he died more than a century ago, so is hardly representative of modern historians.
Which you have not provided.
Just because “undivided church” is an established designation does not mean it is accurate, and does not excuse your comment, which did not say ‘undivided church’, but “undivided Christianity”.
This has been an interesting diversion, and I have learnt from it, but unfortunately I have mostly (re)learnt that you cannot be trusted to correctly describe the nature or the content of your sources, or even your own earlier claims. So I’m going to try[2] to end this off-topic diversion here and revert to discussing Genesis/evolution.