Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
21
Putting science first, unblinkered, unpolarized, unfiltered by theology, it’s all 5. Well the first half, the first two sentences.
Who or what mandates us to suppose to understand the Fall, six centuries in the non-Heraclitean iterative telling, as describing the actual human condition in any way at all?
Why do I have to understand it as a fall? Why can’t it be an attempt to explain why bad things happen? Why does it have to be anything more than Israel retelling older myths and wrestling with the problem of evil—why bad things happen to good people? Why life is so hard for some? Why there is so much pain? God wanted us to have this record of struggle. Or maybe it’s just to teach us humans have rebelled since time immemorial. I’m not sure it’s necessary to view it as a fall—where the entirety of humanity has fallen. Paul latched onto that idea but him presenting Jesus as the answer and culmination of Adam’s sin doesn’t have to be any more or less historical than the two creation accounts themselves. Jesus is the answer to man’s sin. Augustine jumped on a mistranslation of Paul in Latin and original sin became entrenched in the church based on it. It later morphed into the even more problematic total depravity. It’s unfortunate but I’m not sure we need a “special” fall. We all do a good enough job tripping on our own. You would think modern science would have helped dispense with some of these primitive notions by now.
Vinnie
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
24
No I can’t think what I want. I can only think. Period. You said,
Who says? Who says we are supposed to understand that? You’re projecting thinking whatever you want. Why do you think that? It took at least 600 years to formulate the story from multiple sources by countless redactors (never stepping in to the same stream twice: Heraclitus). What did they intend me to understand? Did Somebody Else intend me to understand something?
These ancient men - exclusively - struggled in their ignorant brilliance to make sense of existence. They did quite well compared with Babylon-Persia. I’m fine with that.
Because we received that narrative passed down to us through all these generations. We weren’t invited to ignore that received narrative and replace it with some highly esoteric philosophy of our own personal concoction.
It took a lot longer than that. It’s a big story. And it’s yours and mine whether we recognize it or not.
That you’re part of something bigger than you and that comes before you and will be here after you.
It is once you can reflect on your own puberty that you can see the 5th element of the story, which means that you have overcome puberty. Most of us spend most of our life stuck in it.
It helps to have become a parent and see your own kids go through exactly the same process and to have had an event that makes you realise that you only live under the grace of God and his authority. If one has become a lather oneself one should come to question if a loving father would say "if you are going to reject my authority I am going to kill you - which is sadly how most people still think of the fall. You die as a logical consequence of becoming and living in your own self, which is why I say: “to live forever is the art to learn to live in Jesus heart”, recognising the tree of life in him.
If poetic literature describes an historic event, is it then not historic any more?
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
28
I don’t remember C4th Rome, no. But the story is there.
Why would one replace one highly esoteric ‘philosophy’ concoction with another?
Several hundred thousand years of human evolution alone, let alone the wiring we get from having been fish. What’s more to recognize?
Life is certainly bigger than me and precedes and will succeed me. We all know that. What does that have to do with a highly evolved yet still primitive creation myth? Apart from being the vacuum that stories expand in to.
It depends on what you mean by mainstream. Mainstream understanding of people in the pews? Probably not, but average Evangelicals are not super theologically informed on lots of things. Mainstream as in a view represented in commentaries published by reputable Christian publishers and taught at Christian colleges and seminaries? Yes, it is. But the vast majority of Bible scholars and Christian theologians (even fairly conservative ones) are not committed YECs. More than the majority of people in the pews are though, lots of times because they have not really investigated the science and the simplistic messaging of groups like AIG appeals to them.
It’s difficult to be gracious to the ark park and its sponsor, making the faith and its Lord a laughingstock for the wrong reasons. One reason, among several, none of which is the ‘offense of the cross’: