Read Romans 14.
Accept the one whose faith is weak, without quarreling over disputable matters
My faith is as strong as it comes and has been for 50 years or so.
My faith does not need propping up by Scripture.
That does not mean I ignore it, or do not study or understand it. It just mean that I do not need Scripture to tell me how to live or even who God is. I do net judge Scripture. I do not judge what Scripture tells about God. I do not judge the faith or accuracy of those who wrote it.
Scripture is what it is. I do not try and make it anything ese .But it does not rule me. If there is one passage I cling to it is 1 Corinthians 13. If you understand that you do not need anything else.
Leave your judgementalism at home, in private, where it belongs.
Clearly, because you hardly care about what it says unless the parts are agreeable to you. I honestly have no idea why you are on a forum intent on discussing how science and scripture can coexist. Just telling people to not read and study scripture and to reject what scripture says in favor of your views over and over again? This is not a profitable task in my view.
Pot meet kettle. Your 50 years of walking with God has you doing this on this forum. If you believe your advice is good, you can also take it, no?
It is a wonderful chapter, read at weddings all the time. I incorporated snippets into my vows. You can simply it even further as Jesus did. Love God and love neighbor as yourself.
This Op is pitching Scriptrue against God. Either God is cruel, or Scriptrue is false. Neither of which does Christianity any good! It is judging either God or Scripture. As if either need judging!
People here are trying to raise Scripture up as God. They seem to need it to be infallible. They do not want to have to think or understand more than just accepting what is written at face value. They are abusing Scripture in the name of faith.
I still havenât wrapped my mind around everything you are saying in this comment. While they wouldnât have subscribed to platonism, they still knew what life was like with and without Jesus. There is also the fruit of this eternal life which Paul writes about.
My point or question was how certain are you that Paulâs words contradict an old earth. As a prophet he could write things without having a full understanding of what he wrote.
The scholarly consensus of the 20th century held that the canonical teaching of the Old Testament made no reference to an immortal soul independent of the body in at least its earlier periods.[34][35][36][37] A wide range of scholarly reference works consistently represent this view.[38][39][40][41][42] In recent times, a minority of scholars have partially dissented from this view.[3][43][44] According to Stephen Cook, scholars ânow hotly debate the older, commonplace position that the idea of a soul, separable from the body, played little or no role in preexilic Israelâ and that ârecent approaches to Israelite religion that are increasingly informed by archaeological artifacts are defending the view that Israelâs beliefs in an afterlife were much more vibrant than many scholars have been willing to admit.â[45]
Many modern theologians reject the view that the Bible teaches the doctrine of the immortal soul,[46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54] and Hebblethwaite claims the doctrine is ânot popular amongst Christian theologians or among Christian philosophers todayâ.[55]
its a complicated issue but the consensus for a while was in the ancient past death was just death. But based on Hamltionâs views, if I understand them correctly, there is not apologetical need to make the account say spiritual death anyway since Adam did not die that day.
Personally? 100% certain. Paul was an ancient Jew. He had no idea about the age of the earth or biological evolution. Iâd say he just accepted death is a result of Adamâs sin for humans, whatever he believed about anything else.
âDarwinianâ is a problematic term, mainly used as a pejorative rather than usefully defined (and not just by anti-evolutionists).
The secular worldview that lies behind modern young-earth claims is the âEnlightenmentâ view that science and personal reasoning are the ultimate authorities for truth. Modern young-earthers assume that selected parts of Genesis 1 - 10 have to be interpreted as modern scientific and historic writing for the Bible to be true. In part, this likely derived from William Millerâs background as an âEnlightenmentâ deist who started paying attention to what the Bible actually says. Although he recognized the errors of deistic theology, he failed to recognize the weaknesses of his dependance on his own reason in his reading of the Bible.
A major error of creation science and other anti-evolution views is to equate accepting of evolution with a single worldview, which creation science purports to heroically oppose. But the reality is that biological evolution is merely a pattern in how new kinds of organisms are created. People with a wide range of worldviews might accept it; likewise various worldviews might prompt one to reject it. If one holds a biblical worldview, that all of nature is Godâs creation and operates under His control, then we should expect for science to work. While recognizing the imperfections in human understanding, we can accept science as a good way of finding out how the world works. As a result, we can look at the evidence of the rocks and fossils and other things that were here in the past and derive an understanding of the history of Godâs creation. We can do experiments that test whether a particular idea about how things worked in the past is reasonable or not. When we do those, we see that the earth is quite ancient, that there has not been a global flood, and that young-earth models violate basic laws of how God runs creation. But those findings are not necessary to tell us that an interpretation of Genesis 1-10 as dry âjust the factsâ historical narrative is unlikely to be correct. Even the historical books of the Bible are selected historical incidents illustrating Godâs dealing with humans. They omit much information that a modern historian would want to know, and are writtein in the language of the day, not modern scientific writing (as, e.g., Calvin pointed out, to pick an example of someone not influenced by more modern scientific discoveries.)
King James wanted a new version of the Bible because the popular Geneva Bible had footnotes that pointed out how rulers were supposed to obey God and citizens had the responsibility to oppose rulers who did not do so. The KJV is definitely not free of outside influence, though James made few changes, and some printers helpfully copied the Geneva footnotes over into editions of the KJV.
Look at Paulâs use of death in his letter to the Ephesians
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ
Paul believes in spiritual death. I never stated otherwise. But thatâs not what the death of Adam is limited to. Jesus rose bodily from the grave. Paul was a Pharisee. Jesus saves us from spiritual death and we are bodily resurrected (physical death).
why does cohesion of scripture matter? Are you really expecting an answer to a question that you already know has a universal answer in everything in life?
The answer is: without cohesion the narrative loses its credibility. This is a human conditionâŚwe are the ones who demand credibility through consistency in the story. Have you not ever been inside a courtroom and watched the cross-examination of witness testimony ( or at least watched Judge Judy )?
God wrote the scripturesâŚalbeit he used men to record this revelation to us. However, the fact isâŚits Gods Word (thatâs the whole point). I think calling this legalistic is bemusing, however i understand that evangelicals view the Old Testament that way (hence the âwe are under a new covenantâ claims - despite the old and new covenants being the same)
Despite our differencesâŚi really do like this above statement and it makes me smile. On an equally serious note, i do have an answer for it :
Job 1 6One day the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satana also came with them.
7âWhere have you come from?â said the LORD to Satan.
âFrom roaming through the earth,â he replied, âand walking back and forth in it.â
Satan either âsnuck inâ to the above meeting without an inviteâŚor he inadvertently turned up with his keys at the wrong address. In order to save face and avoid the embarrassment, he decided to âwing itâ (see below)
Revelation 9 1Then the fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to earth, and it was given the key to the pit of the Abyss.
I claim that you are. You change the meaning of the words in the text. You ignore parts of the text which are inconvenient for your interpretation and add things which are not in the text at all.
For example: The word âearthâ in the text in no way refers to a planet. You ignore the fact that Cain talks of an earth filled with people. And you add in sisters and incest into the text which simply isnât there.
I prefer an historical reading of Genesis because I think that is what the book intends, but it is not treated entirely literally by the rest of Bible so insisting on an exclusively literal understanding doesnât make any sense.
It does not. What we see agrees with the account in evolution â an earth at the time of Adamâs family which is filled with people who are not the children of God (not chosen).
perhaps I need to point out the difference between literal and historicalâŚ
Because I frankly see the opposite in people who treat it all as something which didnât really happen. It is inevitable because a story where people and God really didnât do such things radically alter our understanding of God and people to one where God and people do not do such things. I am all for conforming the meaning of the text to the limits of reality, but I personally donât see why this has to mean none of it really happened.
I donât see the issue. In Cor 15 Paul is arguing Jesus rose bodily from the dead. People he was responding to denied it. Jesus was the first fruits of the general resurrection of the dead that Pharisees believed in. Some Jewish groups did not. This is the argument. The entire context of 1 Cor 15:1-21 is about5 Jesus PHYSICALLY RISING from the dead (he was buried an appeared). He then introduces Adam: 22 For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 23 But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him.
The context here is physical death and bodily resurrection.
I nowhere deny Paul can speak of spiritual death or that canonically, or that Adamâs death can be viewed physically and spiritually. I simply pointed out Paul is talking about physical death here. The context is clear. I also pointed out we donât need apologetics explaining why Adam didnât die the day he ate the fruit because there are multiple understandings (translation and other biblical interpretations) of this as the quote from Hamilton in the Word Biblical Commentary shows. We donât need to force an ancient creation myth to mean âspiritual dearthâ when such a concept is difficult to establish at the time.
Paul did use Adam as a foil for Christ, But turns out the foil is based on ancient and mistaken cosmogony but we can still understand the importance of Jesusâs death and resurrection. Paul is casting it in very strong terms at the time that would have made sense to people then. Unfortunately, we know humans evolved and death has been around for billions of years.
So unless we posit a special garden that all modern people are actually descended from, I am not sure how we can salvage that aspect of the account.
Yes, but neither does it exlude an overlap with spiritual death. Which was central in Paulâs thinking too.
And to compound Paul, I am certain if Adam had not sinned, the human race would be in a very different position than it is today. Yet the grace of God is such that sometimes we find something better as a result of past failures. Like finding Jesus.
I am sorry but⌠that make me laugh quite a bit. Doesnât everyone say this even though what they think it âactually meansâ is completely different?
No He did not. Scripture is not God in written form. That would be contrary to The decalogue. Scripture was written by men and venerated by men.
No you do not. You have missed the point.
Many Christians think that they have exclusive rights to Godâs forgiveness. It is as if Godâs heart can only be opened by a repentant request for forgiveness, otherwise He is literally Hell bent on punishment.
You know that nothing we do can gain salvation and that includes any mental actions as well as physical ones. We are forgiven by Godâs grace. God forgives whom He chooses and Jonah is proof that God wishes to forgive all of His creation not just the favoured few.
I politely suggest that you review Romans 14 and stop quibbling over minor issues. How God created is a minor issue. Genesis 1 shows that God created everything instead of the alternative of self creation. Evolution does not create, it develops. Abiogenesis is still a myth. Evolution does not contradict the spirit of Genesis 1 even if it appears to contradict the letter. The Big Bang is when God spoke everything into existence. In the Beginning God.
Science is as much human understanding of Godâs works as Scripture is. And both are fallible.
Youâre right. Just like every believer claims they are âfollowing Jesusâ or they âhave the scriptures on their side.â By itself, it doesnât tell you much. Nonetheless - itâs good to aspire toward something. Why aim at anything less than perfection for oneâs goals. Even though we know we can never reach it. Just as a scientist you aim for objectivity. Even though it will ultimately forever remain out of your reach. But thatâs no excuse to give up and aim at anything else.
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