Trust in Christ is “saving one’s soul from damnation” (both now and forever). I don’t know why we keep reducing that to “avoiding hell and going to heaven.” Can you “save your soul” outside of trust in Jesus?
Oh…by the way, I didn’t actually say “fully.” You added that. I’m not sure to what extent we trust “fully”–we grow in our trust. God determines how much is enough…like the thief on the cross.
I think many a skeptic conversion is exactly that. He doesn’t exactly trust this being known as The Christ, but he or she surrenders his skeptical thoughts to him regardless.
This is why I think you are quibbling.
Not all all! I think God takes our “trust” such as it is (and I mean really is, not some kind of conditional assent with no demonstrable consequence) and that is trust in Jesus. That’s not a “means to avoid hell,” something which is a mere caricature of Christianity–well, of “following Jesus” (since, for the sake of clarity, Christianity can mean a whole lot of things that have little to do with following Jesus).
Nah. That’s an ANE conception of resurrection. If you read the ancient Jewish/Christian work called “History of the Rechabites”, the soul is presented as quite independent of a need for a body - - or, at the very least, the need of a body that we used to have!
You are completely right Ms. Christy. You are correct when you say the following: For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, you are still in your sins.
Isaiah said about our Lord: Wonderful Councilor, the mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
As you know, Georg Friedrich Haendel used this portion of Isaiah in his Messiah, when King George II of England stood when he played this portion of this great piece, The Hallelujah Chorus.
Is “our” conception of resurrection “superior to” the ANE conception of resurrection? For what reasons is the “History of the Rechabites” the final word on resurrection?
Only just a billion plus at least for the resurrection. But anyways how does being at odds with the world make something good? How is this somehow a way to judge whether an idea is true?
Believing that the earth is flat also puts you at odds with most people in the world.
Believing that you are the messiah also puts you at odds with most people in the world in general. Were all the people discussed in this wikipedia page therefore correct?
Well, @fmiddel, it’s not the final word… but it is the version of resurrection that fits the modern West’s world view most comprehensively.
Do you think you don’t go to heaven if your body is cremated? Does cremation defeat the evil man’s expected trip to Hell?
Does your version of the soul require a body? How can you even expect to know anything, in purgatory, or anywhere … if you have to have a working body to do it?
The dependence on a working body is not just a primitive idea … it is an idea that seems far more magical than the Egyptian view of the afterlife.
They do not expect the body eviscerated and embalmed to have to walk around and provide a vehicle for the personality or the soul. The Egyptians were quite comfortable with any number of emanations and “entities” that did not require the body.
So… what makes you think this requirement to have a physical body is a step towards progress?
Mark. Is your post a “drive by” or are you here for dialogue?
Hi Larry. Not necessarily a drive by, but just to stimulate thought. I did ‘like’ AM Wolfe’s response because it was clever even if I don’t necessarily agree with it.
The main thing I encourage is critical thinking, and to make sure we develop our opinions based more on truth than social pressure. I have a lot more respect for EV’s who honestly believe that’s where the scientific evidence takes them then for those who appear to be influenced by the ridicule of the unbelieving world who would think we are crazy for not believing in some form of macro evolution. In some cases it appears to me that scientific theory presented as fact (can facts change?) functionally holds authority over the words of the Bible, which doesn’t change.
And if we believe in the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection, I believe it is feasible to believe in a miraculous, 6 - 24 Hour day creation. Neither can be explained - or debunked - convincingly by scientific evidence in my estimation.
‘ The sum of Your word is truth, And every one of Your righteous ordinances is everlasting.’ - Psalm 119:160
Correction, ‘EC’
I do think that the Bible teaches that a “human” is a person embodied (and we could go through a whole list of verses to evaluate that claim). I don’t think that “this body” is necessary for resurrection to happen (else all the fire and shark victims are SOL). But there’s a reason I think that we are expecting to have a “glorified body.”
I guess to be clear, echoing C.S. Lewis, I don’t have a soul. I am a soul. Watchman Nee lays out a pretty intense study in The Spiritual Man that justifies his claim that a human being is the “combination of spirit and flesh” which is a soul, a life, a person, a personality. I, at least, found his arguments convincing.
I don’t think there is anything I’ve said that won’t allow for a “glorified body”.
I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the original body. It’s made out of completely different stuff…
that’s why it doesn’t matter whether you are cremated or not.
Agreed. I was going to leave it at that, but it’s under the 11-character limit. Now it’s not.
The former cannot be debunked or confirmed because we do not have Jesus’ body to examine. So many of us take it on faith. The latter can absolutely be debunked, leaving the YEC with, as far as I know, only one option and that being that God, contrary to his character as revealed in scripture, has totally deceived us with fake evidence or Last Thursdayism.
Believing in the resurrection and believing in recent six-day creation are not linked or contingent by self-consistency, not matter how much YECs would like them to be. You can, in a perfectly consistent manner (which doesn’t mean you are correct) believe in the miracle of the resurrection and the miracle of God creating the universe 14 bya.
David, for your statement to be true, we would need unchanging facts about origins, not the ever changing theories and assumptions that abound today.
Then there is the issue of coming to grips with what the text of Scripture actually says and was understood to be throughout history, something seemingly of little concern to many here.
I am not dismissing the complexities, I am simply asking people to be honest about their assumptions. YEC is quite far from being debunked.
You are wrong about that. While many of the early church fathers did accept Genesis at face value not all did. If you want to fall back on how it “was understood to be throughout history” you have to accept that YEC was not the only way Genesis was viewed. The current phase of YEC belief goes back to Ellen White’s vision of creation. In fact at the beginning of the Fundamentalism movement belief in YEC wasn’t even included. So most of us here do consider “coming to grips” with Scripture to be important. We just don’t necessarily have the same grip as you do.
Hi Mark,
There are changes in the scientific fields (this is a feature, not a bug, by the way), but the general contours of common descent of the diversity of life on earth, over billions of years, have not essentially changed in the last 150 years. These components of evolutionary theory are as strong as any scientific theory has ever been, and for YEC to supplant them, it would have to explain all the myriad, myriad data points that this consensus explains, and then some. Respectfully, I think you seriously underestimate the magnitude of the evidence here.
Best,
AMW
Mark, thanks for not being a troll 
I wondering if you understand how scientists (of which I am not one) use the term “theory.” They use the term in a pretty sophisticated way. I’m sure one of the science guys on here can chime in or you can do a search of biologos or ask Alexia.
Hang around, it looks like you’d be fun to engage with.
Larry
Mark,
How do you, as a YEC (I assume, apologies if I am wrong) come to grips with the fact that many church fathers did not view the Genesis 1 days as literal 24 hr periods? Many, (I can provide references) for example, viewed each creation day as 1000 years (a la 2 Pet 3:8) as a neat solution to what they viewed as a serious problem, namely that Adam was told by God that on the day he sinned he would surely die, and yet he appears to have lived for another 900+ years.
That historical view of Genesis seems to be of little concern to YECs with their insistence on yom = 24hr.
“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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