Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished.
Remember that Law & Prophets = Hebrew Bible, and the Law = Torah, Genesis-Deuteronomy.
I have confidence that the promises of God are infallibly fulfilled. You should, too. Stop panicking. The Lord’s purposes will be achieved, even though our understanding of what he might be doing at any particular moment in history are cloudy, at best (1 Cor. 13:12).
Answers like these are one of the reasons that I don’t think you are too interested in actually solving your problem. I am not asking “why” you “eschew inerrancy”. I am asking for a demonstration that your self-description is actually applicable to you and your general viewpoint!
Refusing to discuss inerrancy because of your stand against inerrancy is, well, rather coy, ridiculous, or both.
I even anticipated your non-responsive response by adding this sentence:
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"But what is an example that you would use to demonstrate your distinction? What specific words of Torah are you willing to consider as “not inerrant”?
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Since that didn’t work, let me put it in different words: If you do not hold to strict inerrancy, then by definition there must be something you accept as an interpretation that someone who does adhere to strict inerrancy does not accept.
What would be an example of a difference between you and the strict inerrancy camp?
Why not interpret Genesis 1 “literally” and understand them as six days of God COMMANDING his creation. Why does the fulfillment of God’s creative commands have to be restricted to those six days? After all, we see wording like “Let the land bring forth [living things]…” and “Let the waters bring forth…” In other words, God set in motion all sorts of natural processes which proceeded to build entire ecosystems over vast eras of time, just as those processes do today.
After all, God exists outside of the time dimension he created. God doesn’t operate like a human overseer or engineer who issues an order and then has to wait to see it fulfilled. No, God could issue a command and declare the result “good” and ultimate “very good” without any sort of delay. There were no human observers to witness all six days so Genesis 1 is clearly God’s perspective placed into a literary form which humans can grasp. So I hope you aren’t relying heavily on things like verb tense in English when Hebrew has a completely different approach to time which often seemed like a shocking disregard for temporal/chronological issues to many of my students.
I’m NOT saying that the Days of Proclamation version of the Framework Hypothesis is the best or only viable interpretation of Genesis 1. I’m just surprised that your grasp of what God has revealed in his creation about the age of the earth (i.e., the fact that it is billions of years old) hasn’t encouraged you to prefer one of the multiple literal interpretations of Genesis 1 which would allow you to retain your emphasis on “six literal days”. A Days of Proclamation view is an example of an interpretation approach which conforms well to your emphasis of “days” as well as “six” when you look at the Exodus passages. It would allow you to harmonize billions of years and the six day creation week.
Mike, I do believe that this has been a very fruitful thread. You have started a lot of interesting and instructive discussions.
Well you start with God wanted to establish the Sabbath as a pattern of 1 day of rest out of 7. That was His goal. That was His definition of done.
We can speculate as to why God did it that way, but it is only speculation. It is pretty clear that God wanted to establish the Sabbath with Israel for a couple of reasons. One was to establish a sense of the Holy. The other was to establish a day of physical rest. The reasons given were to memorialise creation and to memorialise the release from captivity. The command was given in terms of days as that is how God wanted the Sabbath to be kept. Is there any other way God could have given the reasons when the result has to be 1 day of rest out of 7? That is why I said in the command day must be day, but in the justification day doesn’t have to be day. The release from captivity certainly didn’t happen in 1 day or 7 days. Certainly God could have used some other way to justify the Sabbath to avoid the problems with SGH but remember this was written to the Hebrews and only for us. In terms of it being written to the Hebrews it makes perfect sense to just use days.
Yes, He could have left His example out of it. In other words, if He’d left verse 11 out of Ex 20:8-11 and most of verse 17 out of Ex 31:12-17, we’d only have to wrestle about what “day” meant in Gen 1-2. As it is, He seems to have gone out of His way to make sure that we think of the Gen 1-2 days the same way we think of our weekly days.
He could have left His creation example out of his Ex 20 and Ex 31 instructions about the Sabbath and no one would have been the wiser. People could notice the parallel with Gen 1-2 but they could regard it similar to the way you regarded the common “40” in Matt 4 (Luke 4) and Israel’s sojourning and that would be that. But He stuck that bit in both Ex 20 and Ex 31 about His doing creation in six days plus one. I keep wondering why.
This knocked some old memories loose, so I had to search it down. There really was an oil company started by a guy named “Hayseed” Stephens that wanted to drill for oil under the Dead Sea because that is where flood geology and YEC led him to believe the oil would be. There is a little bit of Zionist and apocalyptic prophecy mixed in as well. You can read more here.
We both agree that saying God took a whole day to create doesn’t make sense when he would do it in an instant. And yet you seem to be stuck on each day of creation must be taken as a literal 24 hour day. Wouldn’t this be a great example of the Bible not being exactly clear in it’s meaning (instant creation vs full day)?
So I guess I will stand on my side of the river and say God must have meant a figurative day since a literal day doesn’t seem to fit and you will stand on your side of the river and say God must have meant a literal day even though a literal day doesn’t seem to fit. At least we can wave at each other across the river.
It would be a lot easier to say it was unclear if all we had was Gen 1-2. But with Ex 20:8-11 and Ex 31:12-17 saying what they do the way they do, and instituting the weekly memorial which became near ubiquitous, it’s just real hard to say the meaning of six days is unclear.
If that’s the best we can do, then that’s what we ought to do.
For someone who proclaims opposition to strict inerrancy, @Mike_Gantt, you sure put an awful lot of pressure and reliance on what even @Jonathan_Burke has demonstrated was a vaguely inchoherent proposition during the time the texts were being written.
I figure you must have some pretty specific ideas about why the Genesis scribe made such a point of saying God made Eve from Adam’s rib, why we have to crush the heads of snakes, and why God killed animals to give fur apparel to Adam & Eve… To me, sometimes a rib is just a rib, and killing talking snakes is a way to entertain the children in the audience!
It is my assumption that this was the case. The force of the fourth commandment was therefore not to institute a 7 day week, but rather to emphatically delineate the seventh day of the week for the good of man and the honor of God - specifically, to memorialize His work in having created the universe. Thus the Israelites were to bear weekly witness to the surrounding nations that one God - the God of Israel - had created everything.
I’m not. I’m just a voice crying in the wilderness, in “To Tell the Truth” fashion, “Will the real Genesis please stand up?” That’s the word of the Lord that stands forever (Is 40:8).
Everyone I’ve known who affirms the Days of Proclamation interpretation would say that all of God’s creative proclamations were completed by Yom #7. No disagreement there. So I’m not clear why Genesis 2:1-3 would pose any problem. Moreover, because God is sovereign and is not bound by the time dimension which he created, when God commands, he doesn’t have to wait for the results of those commands.
I assume you are familiar with the idea that a transcendent God does not experience the arrow of time as we do. God’s omnipresence in the time dimensions is similar to his omnipresence in our three dimensions. For God, the idea of “now” applies equally to all points in time. (That’s why the scriptures state “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” and not “I was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”) God could declare the creation “very good” without having to wait for the land and the waters to “bring forth” because God could directly observe every eventual realization and ramification of his creative act without any sort of delay. Yes, the Bible often has to communicate difficult concepts using anthropomorphic language which finds analogies in our human experience—but we should never forget that God is not restricted within any of the dimensions he created when he made the matter-energy universe.
I never really grasped this aspect of God’s transcendence and omnipresence until I had studied enough physics to appreciate Einstein’s relativity theory. I find it amazing that even humans routinely and individually experience the speeding up and the slowing down of the river of time. For example, when I take a flight somewhere, the higher altitude takes me further from a large mass, the earth, and so time literally passes more quickly. Indeed, these “Einsteinian” differences in time passage would quickly render GPS devices shockingly inaccurate in a matter of hours—so engineers must reset/correct GPS time clocks on a daily basis. Whenever I think about this application of physics, I’m reminded that I’m a time-bound “passenger” on this river of time but God is not (because God is not material, among other reasons.) To God, his observation of August 10, 2017 is no different from his observation of 33 A.D. or 2000 B.C. And when he speaks to us in temporal terms using chronologies and verb tenses, it is entirely a concession and accommodation of our human perspective of time, not his. To God, every point on the timeline of human history is equally “now”.
Of course, if Genesis 2:1-3 clearly defied the Days of Proclamation view, all Christians with a high view of scripture would reject it. And even though it is not my own view, I greatly respect the Days of Proclamation perspective for being a reasonable way in which Christian who prefer a very literal interpretation of Genesis 1 can avoid the many logical, scriptural, and scientific conflicts inherent to more traditional Young Earth Creationist interpretations of the passage.
But does memorializing His creation require His creation to take 6 days? Is your position that if God didn’t take 6 days to create then He is lying when He says it did?
Because there is no explicit textual basis for bifurcating God’s commands from compliance with those commands. On the contrary, in the text we commonly find “God said, 'Let there be…” quickly followed by “…and there was…” or “and it was so.”
This approach would be so much easier to entertain if God hadn’t punctuated Gen 1 with so much chronological speech: “And there was evening and there was morning, X day” - over and over! Why would God repeatedly use words that encourage us to think the opposite way He wants us to think about the matter He’s disclosing?
As an aside, may I ask if what you say here might have any application to something I wrote at the end of the 3rd “Assumption” in the OP of this thread:
That is, does Einstein’s work as you describe it open the door to the possibility that some of our assumptions about time and distance in, say, astronomy might be “shockingly inaccurate” when applied outside a narrow range of values - especially when one considers that Einstein’s work is relatively recent and that new discoveries might say even more about this?
Let me be quick to add that I am not trying to start a science discussion, I’m only giving you an opportunity to shut or leave cracked open a door to the possibility - mere possibility, mind you - that the universe might legitimately appear to be older than it actually is. Regardless of whether you slam the door shut or leave it only slight ajar, I won’t be able to carry the discussion a single step beyond that…so say what you will without hope or fear of a response from me.
(I added the italics.) Back to the matter at hand, perhaps you would be more persuasive arguing for the view you personally hold. May I ask what it is? And would the assumptions I state in the OP allow me to hold it?
No. It seems to me He could have memorialized His creation no matter how long - or how short - a time He took to complete it. In fact, I don’t see how memorializing His role as Creator requires Him to say anything at all about how long - or short - He took doing it. Nor do I see why memorializing His role as Creator would require Him to tie it to a weekly day of rest for us; He could have tied it to something else entirely - and it could have been daily, weekly, monthly, etc. In short, you could take everything about His six days and day of rest out of Ex 20:8-11; Ex 31:12-17; and Gen 1-2 and it wouldn’t circumscribe at all God’s ability to command Israel to memorialize His role as Creator in the way He did or in any other way. This is what keeps me asking why He said in all three passages that He created in six days plus one.
I would put it this way: He told us how long it took Him when He did not have to tell us that. Moreover, when He did tell us, He gave us a time frame that He had to know would one day look ridiculously brief when compared to what science would reveal. Therefore, I ask: What possible reason would He have for telling us that it took Him six days followed by a day of rest if it didn’t?