Is the bible inerrant?

Faith & Science Conversation
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hehehe…yeah nah i think we are all robust enough here to rigourously debate things we are passionate about.

The only line in the sand i reckon is important is that we try to limit our eye rolling. Having said that, i know that is difficult for most here (me included)…so im sure you can be forgiven for that.

What i mainly enjoy here is the good christian company…i love talking about our Christian beliefs with others and i like the science here as well.

One thing that i have increasingly noticed however, there is little correlation between level of education and logical thinking. I regulary make an ass of myself and i note that im not the only one…but thats the beauty of it, there are individuals here who allow failure and therefore you wont find to many “pharasees” lurking in the shadows. I believe that this is one of the more accomodating and engaging forums ive had the pleasure of attending. Obviously christianity.stackexchange sets the bar, however there are some serious deficiencies in the inherrant restrictions on that forum (ahem…ooops i mean “library”) that i think prevent important questions from being asked.

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Thanks Adam,
much appreciated!!!
jon

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Translation and interpretation are two different things. What you read as history I read as myth. Same words but different interpretations.

Again, that is just your human, fallible interpretation.

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I have yet to see one that isn’t invented.

That was a stupid claim the moment it was suggested: it ignores the fact that the message wasn’t whispered but was both spoken and written, it ignores the fact that it wasn’t just one person passing the message to one other person, and it ignored the fact that new copies were made from existing copies, not from something that wasn’t heard well to begin with.

That cannot be concluded from the text. All that can be concluded is that Jesus knew that His audience was familiar with the story so He didn’t have to elaborate, or that He considered it authoritative.
It’s a modern scientific worldview that insists that in order to be authoritative it has to be objective history. That worldview does not rule scripture and cannot be found in it.

You only think that others “consider Jesus to be in error” because you are operating out of a MSWV. Even in second temple Judaism they did not define something as erroneous because it wasn’t objective history; authority and truth weren’t about fitting an objective view of the universe but were about who had the authority to speak on a subject.
To push your viewpoint requires that all of Jesus’ parables not be invented stories but actual history. But if the parables aren’t actual history yet can be true, then the requirement that something be actual history to be true fails.

No such thing exists – in fact those laughing most loudly at that claim would have been my militantly atheist professors. God isn’t “excluded by decree”, He’s excluded for the same reason that the matter of what Ulysses Grant ate on the morning of his last battle is excluded: there’s no evidence.
You seem to somehow think that science should be omniscient, ignoring the fact that it is carried out by fallen humans who cannot measure, indeed cannot even observe, the spiritual world. Science does not exclude God any more than it excludes anything else it cannot observe – in fact science “excluded”, often rather vociferously, stones falling from the sky . . . until some were observed, not just falling but after they had fallen; science also excluded the idea of an atom having parts, right up until Rutherford’s work indicated that there were in fact parts of an atom.
Suggesting that science excludes God requires first of all that they have some way to test for God’s presence – a “divine-o-meter” or divinometer – and refuse to do so. Scienc just operates as we should expect a search for truth to do in a fallen world: it restricts itself to what can be observed, and that not just once but repeatedly.

Nope – it’s just ignored because God cannot be measured. Give scientists a divinometer and testing for God would be the hottest area of research since it was found that atoms have parts.

Except that in science God cannot be a “sensible, logical conclusion” because God can neither be observe nor measured. Or do you think Jesus was wrong when He said that the Spirit moves as it will and no one can see Him do so?

Probably, for those who don’t actually pay attention to science; it’s hard these days to find a cosmologist who actually believes the Big Bang came from nothing; not even Brian Greene actually believes that.
But even if this were true, isn’t that exactly what Genesis tells us, that God started with nothing and called things into existence (or as the apostle puts it, He called to those things which were not, and they were).

None of my biology professors held to abiogenesis, for a simple reason: there’s no evidence either way (yet). It’s an assumption, but assumptions aren’t science at least until they’ve been turned into testable hypotheses.

They would leave out your emotionally loaded terms, but death? of course; it’s part of life.
And the “billions of years” part is the result of measurements and a lot of math. I personally can’t claim anything more than several hundred thousand years because that’s the most I’ve done and/or seen done/measured in the lab (and no, there was no worldview involved, just measurement and analysis).

Most people are no more scientifically astute than they are theologically.

You just demonstrated that you don’t know anything about what Theistic Evolutionists believe – you blew it when you added the word “mythology” since the only mythology they believe would be what comes from the scriptures, not from science.

Because you keep forcing a modern scientific worldview onto Genesis. When you say that אֶרֶץ (eh-retz), ‘eretz’, means “globe” you are forcing a modern scientific worldview onto the text. When you treat Genesis 1 as an objective report of things observed, you are forcing a modern scientific worldview onto the text – and the same when you say that about the Flood account. You have never shown an inkling of treating the scriptures as literature, you only treat them as scientifically accurate reports. You constantly reveal that your definition of “truth” is at the least heavily weighted towards things that are scientifically accurate, just as the entire YEC enterprise is heavily weighted that way, because they resort to science to “prove” scripture – making the top authority science, not scripture.

I know you think so, but that’s because it’s very difficult to recognize your own worldview.

It has nothing to do with translation. It has a lot to do with letting the Bible be what it actually is, ancient literature, and asking the question, “What did it mean to the original audience?”

That’s what I insist on – but you infuse the text with science, reject Hebrew grammar, change the meanings of words, and add to the text.

When God has graciously allowed us to learn numerous things about the scriptures it is stiff-necked to reject those things and pretend that people who didn’t know those things are authorities. What all those translators did was to use every bit of knowledge available to them, but you reject knowledge and thus are in reality opposed to all those translators – were they alive today they would be digging into all the knowledge God has allowed to become available and making use of it.

Besides which, none of those translators wrote what you say, they just used the best words available. And now you insist that the words they used give you actual truth while the original words’ meanings hold no value.

So does everyone here. The problem is that you think that you can pass a class without doing the homework – that’s what rejecting the actual meaning of the original language(s) is.

That’s almost an understatment – philologists will tell use that it is rare for any word that doesn’t refer to an object all can see and observe to keep its meaning, and even those can change with a shift of worldview. To use a bit of an extreme example, if in ancient Egypt you said (assuming you spoke in ancient Egyptian) “sun”, no one at all would hear “a nuclear furnace so hot it warms the Earth from ninety million miles away”, they would hear, “the god of light”. I use this example also because it highlights the brilliance of the Genesis writer in turning the Egyptian creation story against them: he doesn’t even name the sun but just describes its function – an incredible put-down to a people among whom the word “sun” meant a god (who traveled across the sky in a boat) who was either the top god or close to it. It’s a forceful enough switch I wouldn’t be surprised if the Israelites when they first heard that Creation story after Moses did his editing would have laughed at the implicit demotion of the sun to Yahweh’s servant, and not even a throne-servant; the sun is depicted as a servant of servants!
[But then I don’t know what was considered funny at that point in the ANE; I only vaguely recall reading some pieces of what the Egyptians apparently considered to be humor, and the only thing I remember is that I didn’t get their sens of humor.]

Yet it’s more than just that words change meaning, it’s that no word ( even “and”; one of my professors wrote his doctoral dissertation on the use of καί (kie), ‘kai’, in the first half of the Gospel of John [he wanted to do the entire Gospel, but his advisor told him he’d already covered more than enough for a single doctoral thesis], examining all the ways that little conjunction is used and explicating how it differs from the English "and) meaning survives the jump from one language to another, and some are badly mangled (which is the case for the jump from Hebrew אֶרֶץ (eretz) to Greek γῆ(ς) (gayce) to Latin terra to English “earth”.

Yes, because genre is the starting point for understanding any literature, even something as simple as a list – I think I previously used the illustration of a list that could be a shopping list, the first part of a recipe, or a laundry list, and no way to tell unless you knew the intent of the writer. It’s not that “perhaps the original intentions of the writers of ancient scripture have been lost” but that if you don’t know that actual genre the only thing you’ll get from a piece of literature is your own ideas.
And just because a piece of writing looks like genre X when read in a translation, that does not tell what genre it actually is, something I’ve repeatedly illustrated by the fact that Adam’s criteria for something being historical fit books by Grisham, Clancy, Michener, and Steinbeck.

Isn’t that big a deal other than to show that God plainly doesn’t care if all the details of the text get passed on precisely.

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I am sorry but your professed humility does not fit with your assertiveness. You are dogmatic about both sin and death. My views are neither weird nor unique.

As long as you treat the Garden narrative as anything like real we will never agree.

Richard

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Those are not genres, they’re contexts. And for any piece of literature, the context comes down to the culture, worldview, and literary form in which it was written. To use my previous simplistic example, “shopping”, “cooking”, and “laundry” are genres that can apply to lists, and it is quite possible to have a list that does not reveal what it is about without an exterior source. (This is to an extent applicable to Genesis 1, which can be regarded as a list organized by “days”, and without knowing the genre we can’t tell if the days constitute a time frame, a poetic structure, or even allegory, to name three options commonly put forth [which is actually an oversimplification since depending on the genre the days may be meant as one of those but within a different genre altogether]).

Happily for context, there is little change between the time of Moses, of Christ, and of Peter in terms of worldview; there are minor shifts due to the Exile, then Hellenization (thanks to Alexander) – the two of which together somewhat modify the ANE worldview to give us second temple Judaism – and then the Roman occupation which had little influence at all (for reasons I’ll not go into at this juncture). The significant change in context is the shift from primary reliance on Hebrew (plus Aramaic) to almost total reliance on Greek via Hellenization and the resultant translation into what we call the Septuagint; for some aspects that shift can be radical.

In terms of years, yes; in terms of worldview change, not much. It’s fascinating that there was little overall worldview change in 2,000 years, even when Greek thought is included.

Late Aramaic, to be specific; Aramaic actually goes back to the kingdom period (probably before that; I don’t recall for certain).

I think the Midianites spoke a form of early Aramaic. Also, just BTW, there is evidence suggesting that some/much of the Exodus may have originally been composed in Egyptian (it’s a fun argument for linguistics geeks).

Not necessarily. It’s not totally clear just how far Midian extended (just as it is totally unclear which mountain was Sinai) but there are clues which suggest that it may have covered a trade route, and if Egyptian traders were coming by, who do you think the Midianites would have turned to for serving as a translator?

They only look that way in English; the Hebrew and Greek have some significant differences, one of which holds prime responsibility for a major shift in understanding the Flood. Additionally, the shift from Hebrew to Greek changed the understanding of the genre because the Greek world’s literary genres didn’t match up well with the ANE ones (there’s another fun argument for linguistics geeks).

That characterization of copying is seriously off-base; the reality is that the text was copied by people from those simply literate enough to shape the letters and rad what they had set down all the way to professionals (and there were different ways that professionals did copying, as well).

Which again has nothing to do with genre; genre has nothing to do with copying unless a very astute and skilled scholar is adjusting a story/account to better convey the sense to an audience which lacks a match for the original genre.

The early church recognized that the synoptics have inconsistencies, some of which cannot be reconciled, but they didn’t regard those as “errors” on anyone’s part.
This illustrates a major difference between the ANE worldview and today: today’s definition of truth comes from scientific materialism and thus requires no differences in facts and no deviation from scientific accuracy, but the ANE worldview, including its shifted form prevailing in second temple Judaism and the Greco-Roman culture, did not have that same definition of truth – to them, truth depended on whether the author had proper authority, not on whether what was written was scientifically or historically accurate. That difference is hard to wrap a modern westerner’s head around, but it is critical to understanding ANE literature including the scriptures (an example: some second temple rabbis saw the book of Job as a made-up drama, yet considered its message to be truth; that was one of the more difficult leaps for me to make, but given that those rabbis were in that culture and over two thousand years closer to the source, I had to accept that this does indeed represent the ancient view of what truth is).

I skipped the previous point since it had nothing at all to do with genre.

This one doesn’t either, but it shows the biggest issue with YEC: the reliance on a modern scientific worldview – that’s where the idea that the opening Creation account (and a lot more) must be objective reports as from an eyewitness.

Yes – which is why Moses would have had an ANE worldview, and all the Israelites would have had an ANE worldview, and he would have used ANE literary forms, i.e. genres, for his work, and it isn’t surprising that parts of Genesis are lifted right from Egyptian literature but corrected to say, no, everyone, those Egyptian gods didn’t make the world, they don’t rule the world, YHWH-Elohim did that and does that, and those Egyptian gods were created to be His servants but they ditched their job description to do their own thing. That sets up things for Exodus when those gods get smacked down for doing their jobs wrong.

Adam, once again I have to point out that you’re just inventing a straw man here, and as someone made clear some months back, it’s not even a coherent straw man.

Which happened at the time that Jesus was born, according to Revelation.

Again, you’re making up straw men; no one has been saying this, you just stick people into predetermined boxes that for you are the only possible categories. It’s really tiring when over and over and over and over you don’t even pay attention to what people have written, and it’s really rude for you to do it. It begins to sound as though you’re chanting these things to convince yourself so that you don’t have to even think through what others have stated.

Since you never addressed the matter of genre even once yet make this , I have to conclude that you don’t even know what a literary genre is; either that or you don’t actually have an argument about genre so you throw up a smokescreen to try to hide that lack.

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Or, if you consider what Paul has to say about obedience and faith (Greek πίστις, pistis; also faithfulness, loyalty) sin is violation of allegiance to God. It’s striking that we call Jesus King but fail to recognize that in those days the word didn’t mean the head of state of a constitutional monarchy; in a real sense the king himself was the law, and disloyalty was liable to punishment even without any written. Paul doesn’t say that sin apart from the law doesn’t matter, he says it isn’t “counted”, i.e. not written in a ledger to be charged against you. Arguing backwards from the idea that there is no sin when there is no law fails at both ends: that isn’t what Paul says, and it isn’t scripture’s definition of sin (it is a definition, but not the full definition). Satan’s sin had nothing to do with any law, it had to do with breaking his allegiance to God, being disloyal by wanting to be a deity himself, and the same is true of Adam and Eve.

And it should be noted that if you want to claim that the Law goes back before Eden, then not even the Sabbath instruction counts, because the Law is referred to both in scripture and by the early church as “Moses”, e.g. “they have Moses and the Prophets”. So when Acts 15 happens and the Holy Spirit reduces the Law to just four items then even the command to not eat the fruit is nullified.

That is a very poor translation, one of the places where the KJV stumbles badly. The word ἀνομία (ah,no-ME-ah) ‘anomia’, does not mean “transgression of the law”, which was known even in the century before King James. Literally it is the negative “a” plus “nomia”, thus “not law”, which is more than merely disobeying statutes, it is an attitude of total disregard for any authority or moral standards but one’s own; it isn’t just a rejection of itemized rules, it is the rejection of the very concept of rules. That happens to be a very good description of the first sinner we know of, Satan, whose sin was making himself his own highest authority, rejecting even the idea that someone could make any rules or even set any standard for him.
This is why the apostle can write that whatever is not of faith (πίστις, faithfulness, loyalty) is sin: faith is really allegiance to God, which trusts God to set standards, so sin is anything that does not express or flow from allegiance. There are no rules or statutes needed to judge that; the character of God is all that is necessary.
So ironically Lucifer’s declaration, “I will be like God!”, meaning he will be free of all constraints but his own, can be a declaration of faith: “I will be like God”, not in His prerogatives but in His character.

This provided a good laugh. Back then, to give a name meant to bestow a description that characterized the “nature of the beast”. Naming the animals wasn’t a matter of inventing labels, it was a matter of discerning fully and precisely what each one was in its essence. A lion is a lion, or rather a אַרְיֵה (ar-yay), ‘aryeh’, is an אַרְיֵה because in ancient Aramaic and proto-Hebrew that vocable described the nature of the creature. Consider the saying, “Can a leopard change its spots?”, the assumed answer being “No”; this expresses the idea that a creature can only be what its essence makes it.

And given that Psalm 104 tells us that the lion gets its food – its prey – from God, then getting prey counts as “good” for a lion since God does not engage in evil, and thus we should perhaps conclude that being a predator is part of being a lion.

Given the knowledge God has graciously allowed us to have today, in comparison all translators before the Dead Sea Scrolls were uninformed.

It is not merely “a consideration”, it is the starting point, a sine qua non, something that can’t be skipped.
The common error these days is to think that the writer must have thought the same way that the reader does. Of course that’s been the case down through the centuries, but since the explosion of ANE studies a century or so ago we no longer have the excuse of not knowing the difference; it is as though God said, “Okay, time to make that glass you see through a lot less dark” and dropped incredible amounts of knowledge on the world for the church to pick up and rejoice in for the insight provided. The KJV translators had no idea that the opening Creation story was two literary types at once, nor that neither of those literary types intended the account to be taken literally point by point, but today’s translators do; on a perhaps more foundational level they didn’t have the Hebrew knowledge to recognize that the very first word of the scriptures indicates that the account has a temporal aspect which in English has to be conveyed by “when” (though if they did they would have had the same struggle that modern translators do, namely that there is no structure in English which can convey what the Hebrew does because we cannot have a statement also be a temporal clause).

And we still thirst for knowledge; there are yet quite a few words in the OT writings that we are only guessing at the meaning of, or not even guessing and just transliterating (e.g. “gofer wood”, though thanks to discoveries at Ugarit and other places we have at least a beginning of figuring it out [my personal thought is that God let those words be there to teach us humility and we may not figure them out before Jesus returns]). While ANE and OT scholars revel in the treasures so far uncovered, they desperately want more: now that it’s been seen how many puzzles can be solved and how many obscure things made sens of, they naturally want to solve and make sense of more and more.

It has nothing to do with translation. My illustration using a list of items that could be a grocery list, the start of a recipe, or a laundry list isn’t invented, it comes from a list found in Egypt scribbled on a piece of pottery (it was extremely common to use pieces of broken pottery as writing surfaces). It’s a simple example of the fact that you can have a perfect translation (there’s no ambiguity in the meanings of the items on the list) and have no clue what is meant by a piece of writing. With ancient literature if the original genre isn’t known, all you can do is play a guessing game consisting primarily of “Well, to me it looks like X”.
That guessing game is where YEC comes from, except they don’t realize they’re guessing; they look at sections of scripture and assume without even thinking about it that what it looks like to them is what it must be (Adam makes that argument here repeatedly), and claim that their reading is “obvious” – the trouble being that the very criteria used to declare the opening of Genesis (and a lot more) to be “historical narrative” are criteria that apply to known works of fiction. That works by Michener, Clancy, Grisham, and Steinbeck all read exactly like historical narrative thoroughly falsifies that approach to scripture: just because to you it looks like historical narrative doesn’t make it that.

I have read the opening chapters of Genesis in over a dozen English translations, two Spanish translations, two Latin translations, a German translation, a French translation, a Koine Greek translation, and the original Hebrew, and not a one of them say what you claim in a), b), e), f), or g). Those are things you are reading into the text due to the modern worldview you don’t admit you have (what other worldview could you have, without intense study in other literature and history and culture?).

That view can be found quite early in church history and even in second temple Judaism. Scholars recognized that the two Creation accounts are very different and asked what that could mean. The view that these two accounts are actually different viewpoints of a single story comes primarily from human tradition (on out side of the world, from Roman Catholic tradition).

Has also been held right from the start in the church as well as in second temple Judaism. It comes from recognizing that the Garden stories are about humans and thus may not apply to all else.
The contrary view doesn’t come from scholarship as much as from an aesthetic sense.

But that’s what the words mean. I’ve explained how we got to reading “globe” into the account when the Hebrew just indicates the known world (known to Noah; Moses obviously knew about Egypt).

Nothing in the text suggests that the Flood reshaped the land, let alone the planet. That’s science fiction made up to try to make the text fit a MSWV. It;s critical to recognize that such a view dos not come from any biblical/ANE scholars but from people who weren’t even operating in their areas of expertise/knowledge!

On the contrary, the scholarship I share makes the Gospel message come more alive, starting by showing that the Incarnation is pointed to right in Genesis 1 – I’ll leave that thought to see if people can figure out how that works. But I give this comment: by the YEC reading, Jesus doesn’t show up in the text of Genesis 1, He has to be imported there via theology, while if read as the ancient literature that account actually is it’s hard to miss.

Except that the text does not say anything that disagrees with that TE idea – you have to add that in.

Show me who here has said we have “inaccurate translations”, other than in details where people prior to the Dead Sea Scrolls (and certain other ANE discoveries) didn’t know any better.

What we have are inaccurate concepts that place demands on the Bible to do things it was never intended to do, mangling the message by insisting that the text has to speak in a modern worldview.

No – it looks to you like real history, but by all the criteria ever mentioned here in support of that idea, books by Tom Clancy, John Grisham, James Michener, and John Steinbeck all qualify as “real history”.

Jesus treats parts of Genesis as prophecy, and IIRC He calls Adam a prophet.

Many Christians down through the ages have treated much of Genesis as allegory (including the accounts of Abraham, which seems really stretching things to me) – because to them it was “obviously written to be allegory”. That scholars and theologians down the centuries saw it that way should make you stop and think that what it looks like to you may not be what it is. Of course they didn’t know of the actual literary types used for example in the opening chapter; that hasn’t been known till the late 1950s at the earliest (and didn’t make it to public awareness for two generations [which was about typical in ANE/OT studies until this disruptive technology called “internet” and more critically “world wide web” changed the way knowledge flows[), and allegory wasn’t a bad guess since both the Creation stories have aspects that match allegory of the time.

Metaphor isn’t a literary type (and I wish people would learn that!); parable is the more accurate term when speaking of entire blocks of literature. I can think of instances where the second Creation story was treated as parable, though they’re rare, but none where the first Creation story was; its structure just doesn’t work as a parable (the closest thing that can fit is mythologized history, which on some days I think applies [usually Thursdays :wink:] because it has many of the right aspects of later ANE mythologized history but if as I think the core goes back to Moses it lacks critical aspects).

Many have found poetry in Genesis – indeed there’s a lot more than was thought back when I took my first “Introduction to the Pentateuch” course – but it’s hardly dominant. A fair number of people who only know modern genres try to force the first Creation story into that category but it just doesn’t work; it definitely has aspects of poetic prose (c.f. Henri Blocher), but poetic prose is a style, not a genre; it can be used by several different genres, and style doesn’t really constrain meaning the way genre does.

So, to the real question that should be asked: what genre did Moses think he was writing? And the only way to figure that out is to learn what genres were common in Egypt at the time and see if any of them match. [digression: there was back around 1800 or so a school of thought that called much of Genesis “Holy Ghost literature” because at least the first eleven chapters just don’t fit well with any modern genre and no one knew of any ancient genres that fit, either – but then for a long time the Greek of the New Testament writings was regarded as “Holy Ghost Greek” until a heap of documents in the same kind of Greek were discovered] I realized that one matched when I attended a seminar where one panel member presented concerning a type of literature he called “royal chronicle” and as I was taking notes it struck me that he was delineating the structure of the opening Creation account in Genesis (in brief, a ‘royal chronicle’ uses a structure of poetic prose where [usually] days are used as a literary structure to present thematically a great accomplishment of a mighty king); this was in 1992 give or take a year or two. Since then its been found that there was a genre that scholars call “temple inauguration” that has two parts, “making” and “filling”, each of which generally break down into three parts/portions of time, and which ends with the deity “resting” in the temple. The opening Creation account in Genesis fits that perfectly, though there’s a very significant difference: in the usual ANE temple inauguration account it is a king or high priest (or both) who is worthy of such a project who builds and fills the temple, finally setting up the image/statue of the deity and inviting the deity to inhabit the image/statue and take up “rest” in the temple, but in the Genesis account it is YHWH-Elohim who builds and fills His own temple and then makes a living image to stand for Himself, before taking up His “rest” – thus declaring that Yahweh alone is worthy to build a temple for Him.

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That’s also not in the text, it’s just one interpretation. It’s a good one, though, since if Adam is “federal had” then whether or not there were other humans around doesn’t matter; they still inherit what the federal head ‘suffers’.

The phrase is from Jesus and employs a rabbinic technique; “dead” means two different things here and in so doing points to the one that is important – spiritual death. It;s saying, “Let the spiritually dead bury their physical dead”, signifying to the young ruler that he can remain with the spiritually dead or come follow Jesus and have spiritual life.

Where is that written? God’s curse was twofold and specific, not general.

The futility is that humans were to take charge of the world and make it all a Garden like Eden, but then the “managers” screwed up and the world was stuck spinning its wheels and going nowhere until the management issue gets fixed. In other words, we are the burden the world bears!

There’s another notion not found in the scriptures – it’s (primarily) an Enlightenment notion invented to try to get around the intellectualization of faith.

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Dear Bill,
thank you for your succinct and honest thoughts.

Yes, I agree 100% that 'translation and interpretation are two different things’, thus it is your worldview that dictates the interpretation you come to from the words of the Holy Scriptures that you and I read, with drastically different interpretations and resulting understandings.

Yes Genesis is written as real history, and I am in good company with that view, Jesus Christ the very One who created everything that is made, who was physically present there at the creation, and He clearly understood Genesis as real history too.
I don’t know what method you must use to deny this clear and unambiguous fact, but whatever it is, the immutable Truth remains transparently clear for all to see.

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Dear Richard,
it is our disparate worldviews that has us interpreting the Bible’s words about sin and death so very differently.

So be it!
I can read the creation account in Genesis no other way, it is ever so clearly written as history and the Creator Himself, Jesus Christ the Creator incarnate, was ever so very clear by His Words of Truth that He believed the creation account in Genesis is True History; thus so should we accept that fact in faith and trust in Him who is our only Lord and Saviour.

God bless,
jon

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I actually don’t agree with this, but just realized you have placed your worldview above scripture. Since you can’t find a worldview in scripture how do you know that your fallible, human worldview is correct? You aren’t basing it on the Bible.

And it isn’t worldview that controls interpretation but our dogmas.

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Dear Bill,
thank you for your thoughts.

You completely misunderstand what I have written, I am not placing my worldview above the Holy Scriptures, my worldview is based Upon the Holy Scriptures.

The undeniable fact is that the Holy Scriptures and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who IS the Creator, made it clear that the creation account in Genesis is real history.

You can make false accusations against me, until the cows come home, but it makes no difference, it is always a persons worldview that dictates how they will interpret the Holy Scriptures.

I may be wrong, but I expect that as you do not accept that Genesis is real history, your worldview is of billions upon billions of years of ‘deep time’ and ‘evolution’.

Where in the Holy Scriptures are we told that the creation took place billions upon billions of years ago and where in the Holy Scriptures are we told that evolution is real?

It is not I that is forcing a non Biblical worldview above the Holy Scriptures is it?

God bless,
jon

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The please tell me where in scripture I can find this. And don’t say it is because “it is clearly history” as that is a result of your worldview.

Don’t believe I have done so.

I believe this is what I said. The question then becomes how did you come to your worldview (which you need to interpret scripture).

Where are we told it took place 6,000 years ago?

Given scripture isn’t a biology text of course it says nothing about evolution. Where does scripture tell us how the sun generates light?

The irony is thick on this one.

Edit to add:
Normally I am succinct to a fault, but wanted to add this.

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Dear Bill,

Please consider:

“3 Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing Him and asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” 4 And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no person is to separate.” Matthew 19:4

From the above Holy Scripture don’t you see it is so abundantly clear, there was never, ever any evolution over billions of years that brought about sexual reproduction,
God created mankind male and female at the Beginning.
Please just ponder on that simple reality for twenty seconds.

And again, elsewhere Jesus says,

“But from the beginning of the creation, God ‘made them male and female.’” Mark 10:6

Jesus didn’t say millions or billions upon billions of years after He created the creation, He then made man.
Our Loving God ensured the Sacred Scriptures are crystal clear and that man in the real person of Adam, was created at the BEGINNING of creation, and God makes certain Genesis tells us ever so clearly that was on the sixth day.

If you don’t believe the words of Jesus, that Mark recorded above at Chapter 10 verse 6, then you probably won’t believe the plain meaning of what Mark recorded in Chapter 13 verse 19:

19” For those days will be such a time of tribulation as has not occurred since the beginning of the creation which God created until now, and never will again.
20 And if the Lord had not shortened those days, no life would have been saved; but for the sake of the elect, whom He chose, He shortened the days.”

Jesus is letting everyone know in crystal clear terms, the troubles, the sheer immensity of terror, pain, suffering and death that will face mankind at the tribulation before the second coming of Jesus will be the greatest troubles of all “since the foundation of the world”

*“45 One of the lawyers said to Him in reply, “Teacher, when You say these things, You insult us too.”

46 But He said, “Woe to you lawyers as well! For you load people with burdens that are hard to bear, while you yourselves will not even touch the burdens with one of your fingers.

47 Woe to you! For you build the tombs of the prophets, and it was your fathers who killed them.

48 So you are witnesses and you approve of the deeds of your fathers; because it was they who killed them, and you build their tombs.

49 For this reason also, the wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they will kill, and some they will persecute,

50 so that the blood of all the prophets, shed since the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation,

51 from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the house of God; yes, I tell you, it shall be charged against this generation.’

52 Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering.”

53 When He left that place, the scribes and the Pharisees began to be very hostile and to interrogate Him about many subjects, 54 plotting against Him to catch Him in something He might say.” Luke 11:45–54

It is abundantly clear here in the above passage from Luke Chapter 11 that Jesus was speaking to a Jewish audience of Israelites and possibly people present from other nations too, would have understood the words of Jesus as literal Truth, as Jesus spoke with authority and had already performed many miracles.

Also, well-known Jewish historian Josephus who lived at that very time in the first century AD clearly tells us the Jews of his day believed the historical creation account in the Holy Scriptures happened about five thousand years before that time in history, about two thousand years ago. Thus the belief in billions upon billions of years of ‘deep time’ and evolution are consequently a demonstrably False Teaching.

Jesus says, “Do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father; there is one who accuses you—Moses, in whom you trust. For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?” John 5:45–47

Jesus makes it abundantly clear this Scripture in the New Testament, that it’s imperative we believe the words of Moses.

Moses tells us unambiguously in Exodus: “8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 For six days you shall labour and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God; on it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male slave or your female slave, or your cattle, or your resident who stays with you. 11 For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and everything that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; for that reason the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” Exodus 20:8-11

It is abundantly clear to me that this passage was always intended it be interpreted as seven literal days based on the Creation Week of six literal days of work and one literal day of rest.

10”Now Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. 11 And there was a woman who for eighteen years had had a sickness caused by a spirit; and she was bent over double, and could not straighten up at all. 12 When Jesus saw her, He called her over and said to her, “Woman, you are freed from your sickness.” 13 And He laid His hands on her; and immediately she stood up straight again, and began glorifying God. 14 But the synagogue leader, indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, began saying to the crowd in response, “There are six days during which work should be done; so come during them and get healed, and not on the Sabbath day.” 15 But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites, does each of you on the Sabbath not untie his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it away to water it? 16 And this woman, a daughter of Abraham as she is, whom Satan has bound for eighteen long years, should she not have been released from this restraint on the Sabbath day?” 17 And as He said this, all His opponents were being humiliated; and the entire crowd was rejoicing over all the glorious things being done by Him.” Luke 13:10-17

28 “One of the scribes came up and heard them arguing, and recognizing that He had answered them well, asked Him, “What commandment is the foremost of all?”

29 Jesus answered, “The foremost is, ‘Hear, Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one;

30 and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’

31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

32 And the scribe said to Him, “Well said, Teacher; You have truly stated that He is One, and there is no other besides Him;

33 and to love Him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself, is much more than all the burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

34 When Jesus saw that he had answered intelligently, He said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And then, no one dared any longer to question Him.”

Mark 12:28-34

But clearly didn’t you say:

which is clearly a false accusation.

By reading the Scripture, trusting the Lord, and believing in faith that what the Holy Scriptures say are faithful and true.

In the straightforward unambiguously clear genealogies provided in the Holy Scriptures.

Well that is a nonsensical reply to a genuine question.
No body is claiming the Bible is a biology textbook.
The Bible doesn’t tell us how the sun generates light.

But the Bible DOES tell us how the Creator created; that is HE SPOKE the creation into existence in just the SAME MANNER that HE SPOKE all the miracles into existence about 2,000 years ago.

God is not incompetent nor does He lie, He is Truth and Love.

Therefore, it should be clear to all when God informs us that He created the Heavens and the Earth and all that is in them in six days, we should believe Him in faith and Trust.

Evolution is a Fairy-tale that is misleading many from the truth and a whole generation of children have grown and are growing up now, with an atheist, evolutionary worldview that doesn’t auger well for law and order in the future.
Our society is on a slippery slope and the grade is ever steepening as evolution belief is consistently embraced more and more to depths that regrettably see, euthanasia and abortion remove the sanctity of human life for many, marriage and gender as instituted by God are currently under attack and suicide of many including many youth, is reaching terribly sad epidemic levels for those without hope who believe evolution is real, i.e., that they really believe we’re just evolved primordial pond scum, and there is no God, there is no absolute moral truth, there is no absolute law giver, when we die, we die, that’s it there is nothing else. So when life gets too hard, it is very sad that many just end it and commit suicide.

Sorry Bill, but I do not understand your reasoning here?
It is clear to me at least, what the Truth is here; it is your prerogative to differ. So be it!

God bless,
jon

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No, Christ does not verify your view. He refers to the narrative as something His audience would understand. I can refer to, and use Star Trek without believing or confirming its reality.

The Garden narrative is so clearly unreal, but that does not mean it has no worth or meaning. Once their eyes were openedby the knowledge gained they could no longer live in paradise. You seem to think that God did not want ust to have this knowledge and that Adam (Eve) stole it. Also God could not stop them from doing so!

Both ideas are ludicrous. And Adam ends up more powerful than God, because he could corrupt what God had made.

Also ludicrous.

Weeds as punishment? Birthing pains as punishment?

Also ludicrous.

We need pain and suffering to help us heal. It is not a curse.

For once, just look at the ramifications of what you are claiming was real.

Richard

723

If one is an atheist…no dissagreement from me, however…

As a Christian,

not a single statement there is biblically supported…all of it is 100% non biblical. Burrawang has already addressed these points using some very specific and relevant bible texts.

I would add to Burrawangs comments Matthew 24

Christ specifically says…

37As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. 39And they were oblivious, until the flood came and swept them all away.

The apostle Peter says the same thing…

2 Peter 2:5if He did not spare the ancient world when He brought the flood on its ungodly people, but preserved Noah, a preacher of righteousness, among the eight;

Moses in 2 biblical passages says the same as Christ and Peter

Genesis Chapter 1 31And God looked upon all that He had made, and indeed, it was very good.

And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.:

Exodus 20: 11For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth and the sea and all that is in them,

It is impossible to make any argument against the natural reading of the above texts using any kind of biblical referencing. The fact is, there are no biblical references that deny the literal reading of the above texts…when we add more research to scripture regarding creation and the flood (as Burrawang has done in this post) the biblical evidence only increases the proofs for literal historical accounts there.

If anyone thinks they can challenge the above from the bible…let them do so, im all ears?

724

Dear Richard,
I am very sorry that you feel that way.

As far as I can understand your reasoning, it appears that what you are suggesting is a gross misunderstanding of what I believe.

I can only state as a professing Christian, what I honestly believe is a true and faithful understanding of the Holy Scriptures.

I find it difficult to understand why you think the Garden of Eden is “unreal”.

Do you think that when Jesus commanded the wind and the waves to be still that is unreal too?
Do you think that when Jesus fed the five thousand from a few loaves and fishes that is unreal too?
Do you believe that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, or is that unreal too? etc…

God is perfectly Just, He is perfectly Righteous, He is perfect Love, thus when Adam and Eve willfully broke His clear command, His perfect and Just character demands consequences, that is the way our awesome God is, He does not change, He is constant in eternity, thus the universe we live in is constant and stable.

You strangely state,

When Adam and Eve willfully disobeyed God’s gracious command to Not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they brought the consequences of rebellion against the Creator into the creation, things that were not there before in the “Very Good” creation, things such as the first sin, and its consequence death, pain, misery, suffering, and sorrow that all have their roots in that fateful wrong decision that Adam and Eve made.

Of course God did not want us to have that knowledge of good and evil, in His infinite Wisdom He knew it would not be good if we disobeyed Him and knew good and evil.

Of course He wanted us to remain innocent and blameless before His Righteousness, because He is omniscient and knew way back then in the Garden what would transpire, if His command was disobeyed.

From contemplating this matter for many decades, I have come to believe that as God knew that Adam and Eve would disobey Him, this must be the only way acceptable to God to sort the wheat from the tares:

*"24 Another parable He put forth to them, saying: “The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field; *
*25 but while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. *
*26 But when the grain had sprouted and produced a crop, then the tares also appeared. *
*27 So the servants of the owner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have tares?’ *
*28 He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Do you want us then to go and gather them up?’ *
*29 But he said, ‘No, lest while you gather up the tares you also uproot the wheat with them. *
30 Let both grow together until the harvest, and at the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather together the tares and bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into my barn.” Matthew 13:24-30

There will be good people and there will be evil people, the choice of which way to go is each persons own free choice. Just as there are good angels and fallen once good, now evil angels.

Jesus does not want any to perish and so through His great Love for us all, He willingly died on the cross for all of mankind, and offers His free gift of gracious salvation to all sinners.

But, of course God could have stopped them from doing so! God is NOT limited!

Indeed our unimaginably awesome, powerful Lord God could have made the entire creation vanish from existence in a nanosecond as if it never existed, but His Love for Adam and Eve saw God put into action His gracious plan of Salvation, that sorts the wheat from the tares, the good from the evil.

God’s wonderful plan of redemption through His great Love for us all will result in the body of the true Church of true believers who are His in their heart.
He knows them and they know Him.
If I told you that was not the case, I would not be truthful, but I am telling you the truth, yet you do not believe me.
All of Adam and Eve’s family are our family, we are all family, we are all related to Adam and Eve.

But Richard, I do not know why you seem to believe what you do about what I believe, as it is very clear to me from what you have written that you do not know what I believe.

No-one is more powerful than God. Why you believe I think otherwise is a mystery to me.

Adam rebelled by disobeying God. As a consequence of Adam and eve’s disobedience, God’s perfect Justice had God put a curse on creation that as the Holy Scriptures so plainly tell us:

8 And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.
9 And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
13 And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
14 And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
20 And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
21 Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.
22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
23 Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

I do not see anything in the Holy Scripture here that are what you describe as ludicrous.

Do you believe that Jesus healing the blind is ludicrous too?
Do you believe that Jesus casting out the demons in the country of the Gadarenes into the herd of swine is ludicrous too?
Do you believe that Jesus healing the paralytic by saying your sins are forgiven is ludicrous too?
Do you believe that Jesus healing the woman with haemorrhage for twelve years is ludicrous too?
Do you believe that Jesus raising the dead daughter of the synagogue official is ludicrous too?

If you don’t think the miracles of Jesus listed above are ludicrous, then why do you think the historical record of what God did in the Garden of Eden is ludicrous?

God bless,
jon

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725

I am sorry but you are making me angry. Miracles ,the resurrection and so on have nothing to do with the reality of the Garden! That is false logic.

Richard

1 Like
726

Dear Richard,
I am sorry, I have no wish to make you angry.

Why do you say, “That is false logic”?

The Bible is primarily about Jesus and is a unified whole, the creation account in the Garden of Eden informs us about the order of the creation components made by the Creator, who is Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour which is why the Creation, the Fall and the Global Flood have everything to do with God’s Loving Gracious plan of Salvation for all of us; the Bible tells us that the creation was made by Him, and for Him, He is the reason the creation exists at all.

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 The same was in the beginning with God.
3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men. . . . . .John 1:1-4

I truly do wish you well Richard.
God bless,
jon

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What annoys me is that you assume I don’t believe basic Christian doctrine. It’s as if not believing one thing automatically precludes the rest!

Richard