That’s not possible: Christ is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. At the moment the Earth was made, the Crucifixion was already decreed. For the Crucifixion to happen, the Incarnation had to happen. Additionally the Resurrection was going to happen. It isn’t written that Christ could possibly have been the Lamb who might have been slain, it is written that Christ was the Lamb who was slain.
No, the only thing fixed was that history would arrive at the moment the Incarnation began – everything in between was fluid.
The only other alternative is that Creation could happen because Christ had the potential to be Incarnate, but that is contrary to His designation as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world – to be slain, He had to be incarnate, and that makes the Incarnation an established event of history right from the start. As is commonly said, Jesus was never Plan B.
Except you’re inventing this “logical impossibility” – it is not a real one.
I’m not “selecting” anything, I’m unfolding the text. “Prototokos” doesn’t allow birth or death or resurrection as first moments, it only allows the instant that the way began to be opened, and that is the very moment when the Incarnation began, when all at once there was a fertilized ovum in the Virgin’s womb. And that no more locks all events prior in place any more than catching a streamer blowing in the wind makes it stop waving.
I don’t see any difference between your argument and the one that says that all our decisions and all events are set in stone by predestination because God knew from before He commanded light to be all that would happen in history. But both arguments rely on a linear, binary view of things that does not reckon with the geometry of eternity.
It’s not an addition at all, it’s an exposition of the relationship between the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world and all of Creation. It tells us that every last little thing that exists has something to tell us about just who Jesus is, because everything that exists was shaped by the fact of His Incarnation, including those things prior to His Incarnation.
“Though time reflects eternity as a part of creation. it is not a continuation of eternity. Time is an image of eternity rather than a copy. Humanity, as the imago dei, is the unique example of this reflective relationship. Humanity was created in the essence and image of the divine, but unlike the uncreated God/Man, man does not share the divine Form.”
Yes it is possible. Of the six modern translations of Rev. 13:8 that I’ve looked up, only the NIV version repeats the KJV version which you have used. Here’s the proof:
NJB and all people of the world will worship it, that is everybody whose name has not been written down since the foundation of the world in the sacrificial Lamb’s book of life. (New Jerusalem Bible) ESV and all who dwell on earth will worship it, everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain. NIV All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast–all whose names have not been written in the Lamb’s book of life, the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world. NASB All who live on the earth will worship him, everyone whose name has not been written since the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who has been slaughtered. CSB All those who live on the earth will worship it, everyone whose name was not written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slaughtered. NLT And all the people who belong to this world worshiped the beast. They are the ones whose names were not written in the Book of Life before the world was made–the Book that belongs to the Lamb who was slaughtered. KJV And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
So five of the six modern versions I’ve found apply the phrase “from the foundation of the world” to the inscription of the names of those who do not worship the beast in the book of life. In a progressive forward arrow of time, which is all any of us have ever experienced, this is perfectly understandable as God sees all time in one eternal moment and therefore knows who will opt to be saved and who will not.
If Christ wasn’t “slain from the foundation of the world”, as alternative versions of Rev. 13:8 attest, your argument collapses. But even if that interpretation is allowed, it is still perfectly feasible to interpret it as saying that God saw Christ’s death on Calvary as the central and pivotal event happening during the universe’s history. In no way can you safely infer from that that the incarnation COINCIDED with the first moment of creation.
How can the interval between the creation of the first humans and the Incarnation have been fluid if it was created at the event described in Luke 1:35? Such a retroactive creation is a bit like the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics when the position or velocity of a subatomic particle is measured, at which point all other possible positions or velocities in the probability curve are eliminated. If God created human history as part of the creation of the universe’s history just 2000 years ago, then that entailed the creation of the global human situation at the exact moment Christ entered it and the simultaneous creation of the vast set of choices made by human beings that was needed to bring man’s history (including the Fall) to that exact situation. To borrow quantum jargon, God would have had to collapse the historic wave function, eliminating all possible pathways but that one.
If as you claim that retrospectively created history was nevertheless truly fluid, then you are admitting that countless other possibilities in history could have evolved which would inevitably have produced a multitude of alternative situations for humanity 2000 years ago other than the exact created one which Christ entered. But logically, creation of history retrospectively fixes one unalterable path from Adam and Eve to Incarnation and the natural fluidity of history which most of us believe God intended has been eliminated.
In summary, scripture plainly paints a fluid picture in which the people of Israel in particular could have chosen different paths from the one they chose to follow, could for example have chosen Babylon’s sackcloth-and-ashes response to God’s warnings and thus avoided decades of exile. So if history was allowed to evolve freely as Genesis implies and I believe, the world situation Christ entered could have been any one of a huge multitude of different scenarios. But your hypothesis disallows all possibiliities except the one God actually created at Christ’s conception and therefore necessitated the single historic pathway that produced that scenario.
Back to your interpretation of Prototokos, You say you’re unfolding the text, but most scholars unfold the text differently, as the aomin article demonstrated, and does so in agreement with the Fathers of the Church. As I’ve already pointed out, in the context of creation to which Col. 1:15-17 refers, the general belief is that Prototokos is identical to the eternal only-begotten Word of God who was before all things and through whom all things were made, and that does not mean that the Word of God had to become incarnate at the first moment of creation because you think this is what a minority of translations of Rev. 13:8 must imply. This scholarly judgement is based on the whole tenor of the scriptural account from Gen. 1:1 onward which, beginning at Gen. 3:15, anticipated that in due season a Redeemer would come to liberate humanity from sin and which traced salvation history from the inspired viewpoint of scribes of the people God chose.
Really? My argument is that God created a space-time dimension for his creation because he intended mankind to live from moment to succeeding moment using the free will he gave them to make their own decisions under his blessing and guidance but anticipating that they would fall away from his perfect will for them and need redemption. His plan of redemption was to send his beloved Son to take human form and to become the sacrificial Lamb who would be an oblation acceptable to him, reopening the way to heaven for all men who chose to follow it. All of this took place in accordance with the nature of the space-time dimension he chose for his creation. My argument fully understands, as I’ve repeatedly said, that in his eternal mode of being God sees the whole of creation’s timeline from beginning to end and uses this divine knowledge to bring good from evil, to prepare answers to our prayers before they are even uttered by us, to create special souls to help guide mankind towards their immortal destiny, and to intervene in powerful miraculous and prophetic ways to remind us of what really matters and motivate us to do better. As scripture teaches, he wills all souls to be saved but will not force this destiny on those who refuse it. You can call this linear, binary, one-dimensional thinking if you like, but I am proud that all of it honours God’s eternal nature and his creative choices. None of it of course has anything to do with predestination as you mysteriously claim, a doctrine which teaches that God has eternally chosen those whom he intends to save.
Your own argument, on the other hand, is based on a bizarre and unorthodox interpretation of a few verses from sources well known as difficult to understand, namely one of Paul’s letter (see 2 Peter 3:16) and the Book of Revelation, But seemingly throwing exegetical caution to the wind and offering zero support from eminent scholars and the Fathers of the Church, you in effect insist that God was/is willing to abandon the natural forward progression of history through the time dimension he created and create history backwards from an event around 2000 years ago, thus setting in stone the historic pathway from Adam and Eve to the Incarnation, a result of your thinking, not mine. This is potentially a far more disruptive idea than YEC, leaving your readers scratching their heads in bewilderment.
So I’m sorry, St.Roymond, but it will never catch on.
Experience tells me you will post a prompt reply showing that you are unmoved by my arguments, but as I have exhausted ways of clarifying my position, I will not be replying again. Thank you for a stimulating debate.
I know this response is 2 weeks late, however, the above statement is completely wrong…
If what you say was true, then the biblical genealogies would reflect that. The fact is, none of the biblical timelines reflect your claim and that is one of the many theological dilemmas and errors found in TEism.
The reality is that theologically, its an untennable world view. TEists have great difficulty even explaining the physical incarnation and death of Christ as atonement for sin. You simply refuse to acknowledge that the wages of sin is death is both a Spiritual AND Physical death.
Our Saviour demonstrated this doctrine by being spiritually separated from the Father (“my GOD my God why have you foresaken me”), and then dying physically and spending 3 parts of days in the grave before being physically raised again!
What is your theodicy… why is there satanic sin before Adam, or how could Adam/Satan sin?
why is there Satan in the perfect garden, why is Satan a naked animal? (snake is hairless). why did Satanic sin result in second death not first for Satan?
If you believe Adam was created immortal like Satan then you must wonder why would God punish Adam’s sin with first (bio) and second death yet God did not punish Satan in the same way.
But if God created Adam Mortal (from the dust to dust) then you have mortality as an necessary part of Gods design, second death as punishment for free will.
One interesting question is the relation of faith and biological death. Can an eternal creature generate Faith? No they are unredeemable… Why ? they can’t generate saving faith.
Bio death is a necessary component of faith generation Though he slay me , yet will I trust in him : but I will maintain mine own ways before him . Job 13:15
Can Satan ever say what Job said? No he cannot. He is eternally deluded believing he can become God. Our mortality grounds our faith In Christ’s work. Resurrected Christians replace fallen angels in Gods new world. Man was created after angels and created mortal, needing the tree of life (Jesus) from the start.
Keep this commandment without stain or reproach until the appearance of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15which the blessed and only Sovereign One—the King of kings and Lord of lords—will bring about in His own time. 16*He alone is immortal and dwells in unapproachable light.
Man was created to live forever, however, that was always dependant on the connection with our creator. The universe is because God makes it so…contrary to the claims here, science does not hold the universe together…it is very specifically only held together because God keeps it that way.
By suggesting that God only created the mechanisms for all of our reality, it is making the claim He is not intimately involved and did not physically mold Adam and Eve and then breathed the breath of life into Adams nostrils (which is completely contrary to Genesis 2:7).
We have to keep in mind that the entire reason we have the gospel, and remember it was given to us by the Son of God Himself when he came to this earth living among us and dying for us, is because it is a demonstration of the process we were shown in the Old Testament Sanctuary Service of how we are redeemed/restored back to God (as we were after we were created as shown in Genesis Ch1&2.)
People seem to think that when Christ said “it is finished”, the entire OT Sanctuary service and the commandments went out the window. That is absolutely wrong…Christ was talking about the fulfillment of the payment of the wages of sin is death…he wasn’t stating that suddenly all humanity was immediately restored back to God right there and then. The plan of salvation isn’t finished until the following events have taken place:
Second coming of Christ and resurrection of the dead in Christ who meet with those who are living in Him in the air
The end of the millennium and final destruction of all sin and evil and cleansing of the earth
The new heavens and new earth are built
**Christ came here to demonstrate how we are redeemed/restored back to our creator…He paid the price for “the wages of sin is death”
The false doctrine put forward by this forum is that it’s only a spiritual death. That is simply wrong…the fact is, Christ came to this world and modeled a physical life, a physical death, a physical resurrection, and a physical ascension back to heaven.
The Holy Spirit was sent to us AFTER Christ’s ascension into heaven (a few weeks later actually)
Some of the theology above is sound, but it contains errors that are simply contrary to overwhelming Biblical statements.
We need to take a very holistic approach to developing our theology when reading the Bible. We cannot take snippets out of the text and form opinionated doctrines from those snippets. That is a habit that causes conflicts all over the place with other themes in the Bible and one ends up throwing the entire gospel out the window as a result. I have to say, many TEists simply are not even Christians and the reason why is obvious, they do not believe the Gospel… they have no supported view as to why Christ died physically on the cross and what the relationship is to the Old Testament Sanctuary (they say Moses writings are nothing more than an allegory…thus the Sanctuary is a fictional story…the current site of the former Jewish temple absolutely destroys that claim…we know as a matter of archeological fact that underneath the dome of the rock lies the ruins of Herods Temple!
Once you have completed your study of the above (Sanctuary, Daniel and Revelation), you will have my answer to your question (“Adam what is your Theodicy”). My answer to that question is the biblical one and it starts in
Genesis Chapter 3
1Now the serpenta was more crafty than any beast of the field that the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’ ”
The interesting thing about the above text, the serpent is linked directly with what biblical character? Clearly, the animal was possessed by an evil spirit when it approached Eve…and my evidence of this is found in another animal possession found in
You don’t believe Adam sin caused a change in the cosmos including Satan’s fall I’m sure. “world” here means humanity as a group (not the universe) was now subject to the second death intended for Satan and his angels. Why? because after eating the fruit mankind has knowledge of good from evil, and choosing evil is willful sin. We now sin like Satan did, hence God’s eternal punishment is now justly applied to mankind. But God provided an escape from judgment, an atonement for our sins. We have access to the atonement by faith in Jesus.
I’m suggesting the creation of man was in contrast to the creation of Angels, man was created mortal from the dust, angels were created immortal. A tree of life present in the garden makes this point very clear. Adam needed the tree of life before he sinned as he was mortal. God created redeemable creatures called man vs an unredeemable creatures called angels.
"Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment " Hebrews 9:17
Everyone still dies the first death, despite Christ’s work. Hence His blood applies eternal salvation not salvation from first natural death.
If you can see this view point the tension is relieved about bio death preceding the fall. Hence we don’t need to get bent out of shape about pre fall mortality, as it was Gods plan.
I’m not agreeing 100% with a TE position but there is no biblical grounds to claim it destroys the gospel or that it makes anyone heretical.