Is There a Better Way to Persuade EC Skeptics?

I’m pretty sure this is well outside the bounds of 2,000 years of Church orthodoxy — across all branches of the Church. I find such an anthropomorphic concept of God the Father to be limiting and, frankly (no offense intended; this is just my personal reaction), repulsive.

If you can find a single major theologian who argues as you do, I will very gladly read up on it and try to understand his (or her) thinking.

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I do believe there is a better way. But it is different than you propose.

Instead of trying to change there mind, we could remember that their most deeply held beliefs are entirely compatible with evolution. This simultaneously includes:

  1. De novo creation of Adam.
  2. Genealogical transmission of original sin to all theological humans.
  3. Literal, concordist, and traditional interpretation of Genesis.
  4. Textual-critical approach to Scripture, instead of ANE based historical-critical approach
  5. Recent origin of theological humans less than 10,000 years ago.
  6. And much more…

None of this is contradicted by evidence, evolution or science. Instead of trying to change then, an accurate account of science could welcome the full diversity of the Church. All they have to give up on is anti-evolution fixations.

We do not have convince them of anything, but just show them the fact that the science of evolution does not challenge their existing beliefs.

Why not try this approach?

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A little Googling brought me here

Clement of Alexandria, for instance, allowed neither human form nor human passions in God, the Father, and argued that biblical anthropomorphisms were metaphors adapted to the limitations of human understanding. […]

when “the Hebrews mention hands and feet and mouth and eyes and entrance and exits and exhibitions of wrath and threatening, let no one suppose… that these terms express passions of God.” Clement continued, “Reverence rather requires… an allegorical meaning… you must not entertain the notion at all of figure and motion, or standing or seating, or place, or right or left, as appertaining to the Father of the universe, although these terms are in Scripture.”

Origen was no less emphatic on the issue. To him, “The most impious doctrines are implied by the belief that God is corporeal…” […]

St. Augustine and many others, especially the mystical theologians, also insisted upon ineffability and utter transcendence of God, the Father.

Then again, apparently I must concede that there is a contrary tendency…

On the other hand, the New Testament contains very few anthropomorphic expressions like the finger of God (Luke 11:20), mouth of God (Matthew 4:4), sight of God (Luke 16:15), earth being the footstool of God (Matt. 5:35) and almost all of them can be interpreted metaphorically. In spite of that, many church fathers’ held a corporeal and anthropomorphic concept of the Deity. Bigg observes that “In the view of the Homilies, the Valentinians, Melito…, Tertullian Adv. Praxeam 7, God is corporeal. Even Irenaeus finds the image of God in the body of man… Anthropomorphism lingered on long in the East.” Two centuries after Clement, St. Augustine still wrestled with strong anthropomorphic and corporeal tendency among Christians as well as the Church itself. Christians, he observed, “think of God in a human form and suppose that he is such.”

To that I would just say… I disagree strongly, and I agree with the ancient tradition that sees this notion as blasphemous, that God the Father might have, or “prefer,” some sort of human form.

Rather, He “alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see. To Him be honor and eternal dominion! Amen” (1 Tim 6:16).

That’s what Joseph Smith taught–that God had a physical body. That didn’t go over well.

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I’m sorry, I don’t see your point.

So you’re saying that in Genesis 5:3, it could only mean that Seth looked like Adam? I don’t think that’s the only, or even the most likely, interpretation.

How about you expand your word study and include these NT verses, which use the same Greek word that the Septuagint used for your Genesis verses?

“For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren.” Romans 8:29

and

“But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.” 2 Corinthians 3:8

Surely this doesn’t mean I’m going to start looking like a first century Jewish dude, right?

Seems far more likely a spiritual resemblance than a physical one.

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It’s only impossible to miss when you bring your specific preconceptions to the text, my friend.

If you have other texts to discuss, I’d be happy to consider them! Otherwise, I remain unconvinced. But perhaps you have persuaded others. As far as I’m concerned, there are many challenges in the evolutionary creationist view, but “blaspheming God” by saying the human form is related to apes is not at all one of them!

No worries — I’m okay with not reaching a resolution here and not convincing you of my view of the text, even if it seems to me to be more reasonable and more representative of the whole witness of scripture. Many things are not resolved on discussion boards. :slight_smile: That’s okay; we can still be brothers in Christ.

Have a peaceful and blessed rest of your weekend!

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Have you ever painted anything? Before you started, did you have an image of the finalized product in your mind? Did you poof it into existence? Or start one brush stroke at a time?

You can create something in your image (the finalized product) and still go through a process to get to that final product.

Or building a snow man, you can make it in the image of a snowman, and accurately say “you created it from the snow of the ground” and at one point, it can just look like a tiny snow ball.

How dare you accuse the snowman maker of making a snowman that was once a descendant of a snow ball?

I think it is more evolution-ism that says evolution has no end goal or purpose. I think most EC believes that God had the finalized product being a human, that began or has is a descendant of a “snowball”.

Or like a computer programmer. They spend much timing making this code, that means nothing until it is completed, but still means nothing till used. Microsoft Windows is just 0’s and 1’s, until you hit the power button on the PC, that is when it comes to life (using more and more complex codes and programs “building on each other” until it gets to a finalized product of a fully booted up operating system. How dare you accuse the booted up windows to have been a descendant from a 0 or a 1? It is a complex thing with great uses, surely it couldn’t have come from merely a simple number?

I think of creation as God had all that coding in his brain (pretty instantaneously, and didn’t have to spend time writing it down and making beta versions ect.) and when He spoke it into existence, is like the program booting up. And once complete, humans were then created in His image.

This

We were all animals, given life (not biological life, but life as image bearers) by God. I like @aleo writings of an original blessing, instead of an original curse. Homo Sapiens were all animals like all living creatures on earth bound by int’s biological instincts. It was the original blessing given by God, that made us into image bearers of Him (gave us life). The ability to do the will of the Father despite our instinct, to be kings and priests, and what we will one day be restored to be. (Rev 5:9) This is why sinning causes death, we are broken image bearers, going back to our animal roots, perverting the special image bearing status/purpose/vocation God gave us. Any time you sin, you are giving away that power God gave us to do His will (and glorify our Creator), to something else and deny our Creator, and worship the created. Every sin is idolatry.

There is very much intertwining of our spiritual and physical realms.

Everyone who sins gives away their image bearing status and becomes a slave to that sin. Jesus’ spirit never died, He never sinned. Our spiritual body died when we sinned as God told us would happen. Jesus’ physical body died like our spiritual bodies, but His physical body was resurrected and with that resurrection of His physical body, allows our spiritual bodies to become resurrected in Him. We are again restored to our image bearing status through Him who now lives inside us! Rom 6:8

The dark powers I don’t think completely understand the the differences in the spiritual or physical realm. If they did, they would have realized when they came to a head in the hour of darkness when they gave it their all, they would be signing their own death warrant. In attempting to conquer Jesus on the cross, it was instead defeated when the stone was rolled away. This is why Jesus came, to defeat sin, since we couldn’t. That we may have life, and have it more abundantly.

Fabrication, or explanation? Why do we have belly buttons, did Adam and Eve? Is our knowledge of this a fabrication or an explanation?

Sure. You could also argue that we reached this final form through evolution.

A more important questions would be, If it came down to dying for your YEC beliefs, or rejecting them to share the greater truth of God’s love, which would you do?

I would certainly not die over a evolution belief, it is a simple belief in a neat thing that may or may not displays God’s power and majesty. I would not die over the fact that a star is a burning ball of gas if someone told me it was something else. God has much more important things for my life than dying for a trivial possible explanation of how we got here.
How many passages to Paul or Jesus or David speak of how we got here? How many passages that speak of what we should do while we are here? Though they do talk of who brought us here, none of how, but no where near as much as what we should do while here.

Of course it is easier to talk the talk than to walk the walk. It is somewhat easy to say you would die for something, that is a momentary 1 chance, short lived decision. What I think is more difficult, is to live for something. I don’t think the death of Jesus was too difficult of a thing to do, people people die for Muhammad all the time. What is more difficult is to live for something. As Paul says in Rom 7:15. We want to live for God, but still fail, Jesus was the only one that was able to live His entire life for God, that is something that can’t be copied, but dying for a belief happens fairly often. It doesn’t make that thing true, it just means you had strong convictions in it. It would be sad to have such strong convictions in something so relatively unimportant (like the means of our human origins), as to bypass a long life that could be lived for God, doing the vocation He gave to us originally.

Amen!

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@r_speir

You’ve been on these boards for quite some time. And yet your recent writings are more like someone who has just arrived. Is there something in particular that you would like your readers to learn from you? Or is there something in particular that you are hoping to learn from participants here?

It is indeed likely that we will not agree on life on the planet. But I’m rather curious about your phrasing in the first sentence.

  1. Are you stating that you would agree with me on the age of the planet?
  2. Why do you use the term “your science”?

It is certainly not my science. Science is accumulated evidence collected by the work of hundreds of thousands of individuals currently and throughout history. There is not a separate science for every individual that is open to interpretation however one sees fit.

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There could be an infinite number of ways to put an organism together. For example, why do our arms have one bone, then two bones, then a bunch of small bones, and then 5 phalanges? Why not 4 bones, then 1 bone, then two big bones, and then 7 fingers? Why use the same pattern as that found in all other tetrapods?

Also, why do chimps look so much like we do? How do you explain that?

That’s not what you say in other posts. You say just the opposite:

“God is spirit, yet like the angels (who too are spirit), he has a form. We, physically, are in that likeness.:”

So why would God have mammary glands? Why would God have an inverted retina? These are very strange claims.

I am still wondering how you explain the features we share with other species. Why do we share 95+% of our DNA with chimps? Why do we have the same bone structure and organs as other mammals and other tetrapods?

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@still_learning, while you are ‘still learning’ I hope you have found your calling in the teaching profession. So many of the ideas that I have previously posted you have phrased in much more convincing fashion than I did. I just hope that the writers of the next edition of the Catholic Catechism will ‘plagiarize’ the wording of some of the ideas you have expressed.

This is an extremely important question: Does God want us to die for our faith or live for it? Who should we (including Muslims) admire most: a suicide bomber who kills dozens of ‘infidels’ for the glory of Allah, or the medical technician who loses his/her life trying to vaccinate Pakistani children so they don’t get polio? I am not surprised that God did not spell out his will so completely in Scripture that anyone with common sense would know it completely. I believe that God intends humankind to keep ‘advancing’ for the nest 1,000 yrs. But as far as knowing His Will, we will be ‘still learning’.
Al Leo

Most Muslims believe that suicide is sinful. There are verses in the Qur’an that prohibit suicide. Just because some twisted Muslims do suicide bombings, it shouldn’t be considered part of the Islamic Faith. Not any more than the atrocious behavior of the [Westboro Baptist Church] (http://godhatesfags.com/) is part of the Christian faith. All faiths have their extremists.

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@r_speir

Do you really think it is so easy for God to be blasphemed to the point he will destroy you? There was once an Arab soccer team that got all twisted out of shape because the symbol of their faith, the Crescent, was applied to their soccer ball … and it caused quite a turmoil because they objected to people kicking the sacred image of their faith…

Do you think God cares about such matters? Do you think God is worried about you getting the process right for how he attaches his image to humanity?

Hi brother,

It’s not clear who this comment is directed at, since you didn’t use the reply feature, but since you reference post #98, I’ll assume I’m the intended recipient.

I don’t see where I expressed “concern for you.” I’m not particularly concerned with people who have a difference of opinion with me. (Otherwise the load of concern that I would be carrying around all day would be great indeed! Far better for me just to live and let live.) I merely expressed that you failed to convince me. This failure to convince me may concern you, but it doesn’t concern me.

If anything, my concern is perhaps that my tone may have somehow been needlessly inflammatory. You seem worked up in this reply, which was not my intent. I should probably back away from the confrontation — it really gains nothing. You needn’t get worked up on my behalf. I’m quite confident that I’m not in “peril” for my belief that the God of the universe is far too transcendent to have a physically human form. If I were in peril, then God would surely have smitten most of the early Church fathers that I cited above. No, I have many other things the Lord is working through with me that would be more likely sources of peril to me than a belief that I share in common with most of the Church.

This whole “intermediate steps” thing is really puzzling to me, I’ll admit. Can you tell me where I suggested something so odd? I mean, if you care to continue the conversation, which I’m happy to drop.

Deem away, my brother! You wouldn’t be the first or the last to consider me a heretic (though most are too polite to tell me to my face). I’m okay with that… it’s part of this messy thing we call Christian life in community, particularly of the American Protestant persuasion.

I’m sorry if it bothers you, but I do continue to maintain (my personal opinion) that it’s actually idolatrous to imagine the transcendent God as having a human form. And I believe that the verses you have cited work just as easily for me as for you. We are not image-bearers because of our physical form. In conclusion, as I said (as an olive branch to you!): We evolutionary creationists have plenty of issues to work through—I’ve spent most of my adult life so far slowly cranking through them—but this is not remotely one of them. You can write me off if you like, but please don’t lose sleep over my damnation. I’m confident of my adoption into God’s family, and we’ll work this all out for good when we see him “face” to face.

Have a peaceful evening —
AMW

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Thanks for the kind words sir. I think for now, I’ll keep to flying the friendly skies. Unless or until God calls me into the teaching field as I am not a great speaker, but am slightly better with typing and editing as a much slower process. Though I am aware that Moses wasn’t the most confident speaker either before being called by God, so I don’t rule out anything with God.

Feel free to always plagiarize anything I say. I don’t need or deserve any credit, give God the glory if He was able to speak to you through my words. Any thought (that is worth anything) that I have comes from God.

Your “original gift” idea is he first time I have heard that idea and that interested me, but I didn’t quite adopt it yet (I don’t even think I believe in evolution at the time). But it wasn’t until hearing from many lectures from N.T Wright explaining the scriptures so well that this idea and evolution made such overwhelming sense with so many other biblical passages and things I struggled to explain or understand.

Even using this logic doesn’t rule out evolution.

If a human son is in the physical image of a human father…at what age does he Son take up this image? Surely Seth was not poofed as an adult in the physical likeness of Adam? What about as a fetus? Or a 3year old? What about as a zygote? With no arms or legs…Seth was still in the image of Adam right?

So could not a single cell billion years ago that eventually became a human or a monkey that will become a human still fit humans being physically in His likeness?
Of course that cell didn’t “turn” into a human nor did a money. Rather it was an earlier stage of the human species developmental process, brought about through evolution, like a zygote is an earlier stage of the birthing process brought about through gestation.

Both have a process with an end state, like a painting or a snowman that has an intermediary step that resembles very little of the final product, but had the final product in mind before the first step began.

I am not sure if biologos aligns with this theory or not or if they think Homo sapiens just had the mental capacity ideal, so God bestowed image bearing status to them, but evolution was random and did not have an end state in mind.
I am not sure which I believe yet, nor am I convinced that we share God’s physical form or not. As being made in His spiritual image is also a logical interpretation supported by many verses as well.

I’m just presenting how evolution can be in line with the beliefs of a being created in His physical image too.

Though if we have a the same physical form as God, how would you explain Col 1:15? “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation?”

Or Heb 1:3”The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. ”

Why have a form if your form if invisible? And Jesus existed before humans. Jesus was the image of God. We saw Jesus’ perfect spirit, and the perfect image bearer. We also saw Jesus took the physical form of human. But who is to say that Jesus wouldn’t have taken a different physical form if we were different?

I lean more towards image being spiritual, but I’m not adamant on either side.

But an analogy I like to use, is that God is light, and Jesus is a prism, that allows us to see all the facets of God’s glory. Like Heb 1:3 speaks of.

The significance of if we look like His physical form (which might be true), that is pale in comparison to our spirits being in His image. A paraplegic (born without limbs) is fully spiritually capable of still being in His image I think.

18 posts were split to a new topic: Immortality of the Soul in the Bible?

@still_learning

I agree with you. Faith is trusting in God, which means loving God and loving others. Love and faith are having a trusting relationship with God, even when you are not sure you are right. Selfishness and fear are sin and death, because they result in separation from God, just as they did in the Garden of Eden.

People who are trying to serving honor God and love others, but don’t always succeed are in a much better relationship with God than people who are sure they know what is right.

Jesus tells three parables about judgement in Matthew 25. A. Ten Bridesmaids telling us to be Ready and not be weary of doing right. B. The Talents telling us what it is important is not so much the gifts that we have, but how we use them to serve . C. The Judgment of the Nations telling us that when we help the least of the brothers and sisters of Jesus you do it to Him.

Jesus tells us that we need to be in right relationship to Him and to others with the understanding that we will often fail, but to be humble enough to keep on trying. We are not to judge others by looking down at them, but to remember we are all brothers and sisters living in this world together.