… 
So you’re suggesting that the resurrected Jesus, when he met with his disciples, and ate fish with them, and allowed them to touch his body and confirm that he was not a spirit… when he spoke to them…
they weren’t hearing him by sound waves hearing their ears?
It is impossible to know. There was nobody there with a tape recorder or a device for measuring sound waves. But I would say probably there were no sound waves.
When He came to them, did He require a door to come into that room? No.
When He showed them holes in his arms and feet, does that mean He couldn’t heal them? No.
When He ate, does that mean He required food to live? I don’t think so.
When He was born, Jesus was 100% human, living and dying according to the laws of nature. He used doors, required food, and healed slowly like all of us. (He was 100% God, but God could become a human being and He did.) But the spiritual body is quite different and does not live according to the laws of nature. Does that mean He wasn’t human anymore? No. In Him humanity and deity were made one and with resurrection we will be like Him. Does that mean we will become God? No. We will always be finite, and there will always be more for God to give and teach us. Eternal life is an eternal parent-child relationship.
The Greeks could be a counterpoint. They seemed pretty serious about their Celestial Spheres idea.
I also find it interesting that you allow for allegorical and non-literal explanations of physical realities, but don’t seem to give the same lenience when it comes to historical epochs that predated the culture by thousands of years. If anything, a mythical past seems much more understandable than a mythical explanation of the here and now. We still talk about George Washington and his cherry tree, even knowing it is a myth.
That pretty well pegs what has bothered me about his position – nicely put.
And for that matter choosing what parts of experience to believe? or perhaps whose experience to believe? My experience says miracles and demons are real but rare.
Walton has done some fantastic work but over the last several years I think he’s been going beyond what the material actually shows – this would be yet another instance. At least one scholar has soundly countered this, showing how use of רָקִיעַ (ra-kee-ah) isn’t as unitary as Walton’s view requires, i.e. that sometimes רָקִיעַ means a solid dome and other times it include what we call the atmosphere (or at least the breathable portion; they didn’t know how thin it gets up high!). Unitary definitions are nice, but aren’t as common as most of us might wish (e.g. the YEC distortion of “all” in early Genesis).
His earlier work is sound, but I’ve started pretty much treating carefully everything he’s done since he first made the claim that Genesis 1 isn’t about material creation at all; I know the point he’s trying to make but it’s overstated. He’s fallen into (IMO) a trap many popular scholars do, of trying to state scholarly conclusions in popular language and tripping over his own feet as it were in an effort to communicate. That was the first big “oops” I’ve noticed in his presentations.
But that’s why it’s nice to have multiple scholars doing popular expositions; Walton can be balanced with Heiser and Mackie (to name a couple familiar here) and others. It also reminds me of one measure of good scholarship noted by one of my professors: the willingness to say “I wouldn’t go that far” when someone suggests that some certain idea is the logical result of one of that scholar’s positions. Michael Heiser is great on this aspect, one reason I like his comment that he never had an original idea, that everything he says is found in the literature. Tim Mackie just doesn’t go out on limbs where that’s really necessary; he’s conservative in that way.
I’ll have to go listen to Walton about the firmament again; from what I recall his position doesn’t preclude your paragraph that stars out with “A moment’s reflection shows this to be utterly absurd…”. As a comparison, many ANE cultures held to a belief in multiple “heavens” (something we see in Paul when he mentions “the third heaven”), usually three or seven, and while they can be found saying that being type A is found in one heaven and being type B is found in a different heaven that does not preclude them saying that being types A and B share a dwelling in the heavens; so also an ancient Hebrew may have regarded the sun and stars and birds as sharing the רָקִיעַ but that doesn’t preclude them recognizing that the different entities have their distinct portions of the רָקִיעַ. So Luther’s admonition to “defend [the neighbor], speak well of him, and explain everything in the kindest way” (on not bearing false witness) can be applied to scholarship: don’t overreact, and – as the saying goes – put the best construction on everything.
So don’t overdo the scepticism.
Nice analogy.
Good way to say what I was fumbling at!
Right up to the solid dome! This is where the definition of רָקִיעַ not being unitary enters in; the רָקִיעַ was both the solid dome and everything above the ground.
(Sloppy thinking? Maybe, or just different.)
Nice point! It makes me think of a day when I was watching a USN fighter go overhead and noticed it “pass by” a tiny speck in the sky: that tiny speck turned out to be a pair of bald eagles so high they appeared as a single bit of “not-sky”, something I discovered when they stooped and struck something in the water of the reservoir there. The interesting aspect is that normally one thinks of a fighter jet flying high and birds flying lower, but in this instance it was the other way around, the “normal” configuration reversed.
Yes – that relies on a second-Temple view that the heavens included the air right down to the earth (interesting bit of trivia: some second-Temple thinkers held that the realm of angels reached right down to the ground [but not into it] and thus the air counted as the lowest heaven).
Keep in mind that often they are trying to communicate to people whose functional education level is about 7th grade – something that sadly applies to a large portion of today’s evangelicals in the U.S.
I’ve listened to his material about “old world science” and he’s actually very sound: he’s showing that from a naked-eye set of observations, the ancient view of a flat earth with a solid sky-dome, etc., was decent science. With the naked eye, there is no reason to believe that the moon is any farther away than a tall mountain, it’s only the fact that the moon never hits a mountain that says it’s above them all.
BTW, mountains are an important case here because the ancients did regard them as touching heaven; that was the point of the Tower of Babel! We find that story silly because we “know” that space (heaven) doesn’t start until 100km up, but when you regard mountains as reaching the heavens (and supporting the רָקִיעַ even), building a tower for talking to the gods makes perfect sense; just get it high enough to count as a mountain where you are (also keep in mind that they didn’t know just how high mountains got).
Why wouldn’t “as they saw them” be the same as their “cosmology or scientific understanding”? Having science not be the same as what things look like around us is a very recent historical concept!
Heck, that happens here on a regular basis!
Can’t resist . . . .
They did not speak of what they did not know.
But that isn’t my position at all.
I have repeatedly made it clear that He does intervene.
AND the programmer is an EXCELENT example, because HOW does the programmer intervene? By breaking the laws by which the computer works? NO! What He does… what programmers always do (and as a programmer I do KNOW)… He puts in a back door through which he can interact with the program as it is running! Remember this back door in the laws of physics is one of the reasons I believe in God in first place. So of course, I don’t believe in any of this magic crap. It would contradict one of the reasons I believe in the first place.
Well, I personally have serious doubts that the ancient Greeks truly, literally believed they could climb up Mt. Olympus and give Zeus a high-five…
I do like to try to be consistent, but please forgive my slowness, but I’m not quite following your critique here… any chance you could give me a concrete example of where you think I’m not giving “the same lenience” specifically?
in case it helps clarify… I am completely good with things that are recognized as myth being referenced to make a modern comparison… hence, I have no logical objection to the idea that the story of Jonah was a myth, and Jesus referenced it to make the comparison of “Jonah was in the whale for three days, the son of man would be in the grave 3 days.” Nothing would be lost if he had said (hypothetically), “Just as Sleeping Beauty was asleep for three days, so will the son of man sleep for 3 days…”
But my issue is when someone makes an argument, the premises of which depend on it actually being historical… Hence, when Jesus was asked about the legitimacy of divorce, and he replied by referencing the way the creator had made them… then if he and his hearers knew he was just referencing some mythologic, non-historical story… then he wouldn’t have had much of an argument, no?
I’m OK with referencing the cherry tree idea for literary or other rhetoric purposes… but you do see that it would be a different category entirely if a modern environmentalist was petitioning a local council to remove a statue of G. Washington based on the fact he once indiscriminately chopped down a cherry tree, no?
I guess I don’t understand why it depends on it actually being historical.
If a modern environmentalist said, “We should try to improve a small part of our environment each day instead of trying to cure everything at once because, like the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady wins the race,” I wouldn’t thumb my nose at the idea because it’s just a fable.
Indeed. All I have to do is imagine that if a future scholar in the year 2825 read my writings… took them woodenly literally, and wrote a PhD thesis on what D.Fisher “really” believed… it would probably be laughable.
Point taken. I’ll acknowledge that it is probably a bit personal… and perhaps I read him with a certain “lens.” But there is just a certain pattern of the way he just is a bit too “fast & loose” with facts when they suit him that really rubs me the wrong way… He just strikes me as the kind of person I’ve seen in other contexts that will never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
I was skeptical reading various claims in his books, but what really set me off was this: He once relayed a story in a video where he was giving an illustration, and explained to the audience about why Pluto was not considered a planet anymore:
"I was at a conference about a year ago, and there was a UCLA astronomer giving a paper and he said, ‘You know why Pluto’s not a planet anymore?’ (‘no, tell us! please!’) He said, 'Well, we found, with all the improved technology, we found 300 plus other bodies, right, in the vicinity of Pluto that were exactly the same as Pluto."
This is an absurd exaggeration at best, and conveys an absolute falsehood to his listening audience. 300 trans-Neptunian objects “exactly the same as Pluto”??? There’s no generous way to interpret this, it is an outright falsehood. Giving this assertion the most generous interpretation I can (@klw 
), I can only assume that Dr. Walton heard something this astronomer said about there being hundreds of trans-Neptunian objects, he erroneously understood this to mean there were 300 objects near-identical to Pluto, and then started using that as an illustration without ever bothering to confirm if his understanding of the data was in fact accurate. The only other interpretation I can see is that he knew that there were not any such number of objects even remotely describable as “exactly the same as Pluto”, and he intentionally lied in order to make a more compelling illustration. Generosity and charity compels me to assume the former interpretation, of course.
This had nothing to do with OT history or interpretation, of course - but someone carelessly making this kind of categorically false claim is like nails on a chalkboard to me… and to borrow from C.S. Lewis, “After a man has said that, why need one attend to anything else he says about [anything] in the world?” To relay this kind of radical falsehood, I feel like I am dealing with someone that simply is not interested in being careful to pursue or communicate basic truth. How do I know that anything he writes about the OT or the ancient Hebrews is not just as exaggerated, assumed, speculated, baseless, or similarly erroneously understood, and he simply passes it on to his reader as established fact without giving any due diligence to actually confirming its veracity?
I agree, of course… but then the modern environmentalist would be, as I said, referencing a parable for its allegorical usefulness, of which as I stated I have no objection.
Please tell me that you can see the difference between that, and a hypothetical modern environment demanding to remove a statue of G. Washington because of the fact that he carelessly destroyed a cherry tree…?
Would you not also, like me, “thumb your nose” at a modern environmentalist that was demanding the removal of a statue of G Washington literally on the basis of his chopping down said cherry tree?
The back door, which allows him to manipulate the very universe he created that normally runs according to its own laws?
Kind of like God choosing to manipulate the molecules of the world he made in order to allow himself to speak audibly, while never actually breaking any such laws of nature?
From what I am reading, Jesus made no mention of Adam and Eve. Instead, Jesus said God made humans as man and woman which is true whether Adam and Eve are historical or mythological. It is even true for theistic evolution and/or evolutionary creationism.
That could be, but any chance we could confirm agreement on that previous point before moving on?
Sure, if someone said GW’s statue should be taken down because he chopped down a cherry tree and fessed up to it later, then they are making a bogus argument.
Added in edit: There’s also the issue of facts v. theology. If God commanded people act in a certain way because the Earth is flat, what are we to do with this commandment? Likewise, if the foundation of a commandment is the claim that all of humanity descended from a single couple 6,000 years ago when the facts demonstrate that no such thing happened, what are we (speaking as an atheist, so more of a general “we”) to do with this commandment?
Appreciated… then I think we agree in principle, and you can see my basic principle… that if someone is referencing something to make an illustration, allusion, reference, or the like, then no, I have no categorical or logical objection to such.
I would object, though, to someone claiming that the historical veracity of an event is irrelevant if or when someone is making an argument and the historicity or veracity of the historical event is the very basis of the argument.
So if you want to discuss whether or not Jesus genuinely appeared to be basing his argument on historical account in Genesis, or if he was simply referencing the reality of humans having existed as “male and female” (and his phrase “in the beginning” was simply poetic or exaggerated), then we can do so, but at least I think we understand each other about the difference between simply referencing a point for its rhetorical value or as an allusion, and the problem involved in actually basing an argument on the historical veracity of a premise. I hope I am perhaps free of the charge of inconsistency, at least?
Except that we have a concept of distances that make the circumference of the globe we live on look insignificant whereas to them back then there was no reason to believe that the sun was any farther up than the nearest mountaintop, so the analogy fails.
Actually it is – the word φωνή (foe-NAY) includes the concept of sound except when it is used in the generic sense of language or dialect. The primary meaning is “an audible sound produced by living creatures” and is chiefly used of “the voice of man”. In Greek use prior to the New Testament, in terms of divine speech φωνή always indicated something heard, with a possible exception in Socrates. The Hebrew word behind φωνή in the LXX tends to refer to noise; voice is just a noise made by living creatures; this continues to be true of rabbinic Judaism and later (fun fact: to Josephus, the voice from the burning bush resulted from the fire’s sound being modulated!).
Looking at the original language, it’s unreasonable to accept any meaning at the Baptism of Jesus other than that there was audible sound.
Same Greek word, same Gospel writer, so same argument.
Different language, different culture. Back then even the word “(to) read” meant to vocalize.
No – the word used, φωνή, means an audible sound.
(emphasis mine)
That’s where I think Walton fails – he’s trying to make a sharp contrast to get an idea across but fails to be as careful as he would with other scholars.
It’s not hard to stumble into; I catch myself over-simplifying dune ecology when I talk with people about my conservation work, usually quickly enough that I note that I just made an oversimplification and offer an explanation.
Given that a number of studies have shown that in the U.S. the typical person reads and hears at a 6th - 7th grade level that’s not a bad working assumption.
In general in the ANE, yes – it’s why Egyptians, Canaanites, Babylonians and the rest buried important items with the deceased!
Late, there is some indication (after the introduction of Greek thought) that these things were regarded as translating to some other form, but until the time of Alexander and the resultant influence of Hellenism I can’t think of any indication that they thought that the heavenly realm was any less solid than this one.
Except that with Walton and others that “believes it because” doesn’t go back very far; what is now written about the ANE in these matters is fairly recent scholarship to a large extent, or has been reinforced by research in ancient texts and archaeology, particularly a lot of second-Temple Jewish material.
And it’s ongoing; I believe it is still the case that there are more ancient writings sitting in boxes and drawers to be tackled than have ever been published, and the numbers keep increasing (though that gap is closing given the photographic tools and the internet now in common use).
Two totally different categories of meaning – and in the second, the sense of what Jesus said (quoting the prophet) requires that “hearing” be audible: “hearing, they do not hear”, in other words, their ears and brains receive the sounds but their minds do not engage the meaning.
No, but it meant they were physically palpable!
Besides which, why would He heal them? those are His glory, the evidence of ♱ε♱έλεσ♱αι, τετέλεσται, “It is [now and forever completely] finished!”
Jesus replied by referencing the way the Creator makes all of us and joins each couple together. He read day six of creation as showing how from the beginning (the Greek preposition apo, not the en of “in the beginning”) God made them male and female, claiming that God makes every person. He read the Eden story as showing how God joins together every married couple – even ones with parents to leave.
Indeed, if he had just been pointing to historical events, he wouldn’t have much of an argument. He builds to this conclusion: “Therefore, what God has joined, let no man separate.” Nobody was trying to give Adam and Eve a divorce. They weren’t the issue. Showing that God created Adam and Eve and joined them in marriage doesn’t make his case. What makes his case is the way he universalizes both the creation week and the Eden account, saying God makes all of us and unites every married couple.
As I’ve said before, his opponents thought Moses’ divorce legislation was universal, but Jesus relegates it to ancient history. Meanwhile, the creation accounts that some view as ancient history are actually universal!
In the Lord of the Rings movie, they sent Boromir in the boat with his sword and broken horn… not because they believed them to go into afterlife with him…
And did none of the Egyptians, etc., ever notice that if they dug up a body, that said items that they buried with Grandma were still there in the grave? Not to mention, did they never notice that the bodies of the deceased people were still in the graves in the decades after they were buried? I suspect they understood these things on a multifaceted level… I’m not disputing that at some level they had some sense of these things “going with” their dearly departed, or even of their dearly departed “going” somewhere else (perhaps not categorically different than we do…) but I still have significant doubts that they literally believed that those items buried with their deceased, physically, in a woodenly literal manner, got transported somehow into the afterlife along with the very physical bodies of the deceased, if they always knew good and well according to the evidence of their own eyes that said bodies and items buried remained right where they were. Perhaps, just perhaps, they were perceiving these things in something other than a strictly, woodenly, literalistic, physical manner?
(At least, can we agree that the various ancient grave-robbers didn’t harbor the illusion that said items buried with the dead had been immediately transported into another dimension, vanishing from siad graves, and that they remained there in the graves available for unscrupulous people to rob?)
Similarly, the Greeks and Romans I understand buried their dead with a coin so as to pay a toll to Charon for passage over the river Styx… did they woodenly literally believe that the very physical body they had just buried would somehow get physically pulled out of said grave, then physically transported, coin in hand, to some remote physical location and have to physically pay said literal, physical toll to a physical boatman in order to get to their final physical resting place? Even though they knew good and well that any time they dug up a grave, the body, and coin, would still both be there in the earth? Perhaps, just perhaps, they perceived of these things in something other than a strictly woodenly literal, woodenly physical way? Just maybe???
“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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