I agree except that He had no occult knowledge of science and history and could therefore make no such effort. He was fully enculturatedly human and knew quantitatively what His culture knew. Which was of extremely low quality. Qualitatively He knew what His divine nature availed Him. Which was of the Highest.
The Jews described God the Killer from Genesis to Revelation. No? What they thought about Him is in the same library.
They also believed in God the merciful - the God of justice - a God for all nations too. While a great preponderance of the older testament can be used to support your observation, there are just too many glaring foreshadowings of the God revealed later by Christ to let your thesis of “Killer God” rest easily. Such a thesis begins to have problems in Genesis already, much less in all the other prophetic writings. And then Jesus comes and blows the whole thing wide open for us. “Killer god” turns out to not be the final word on who God is.
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Ahh thats what he meant. Well you sum it up great mervin.I fully agree
They also believed in God the merciful - the God of justice - a God for all nations too. While a great preponderance of the older testament can be used to support your observation, there are just too many glaring foreshadowings of the God revealed later by Christ to let your thesis of “Killer God” rest easily. Such a thesis begins to have problems in Genesis already, much less in all the other prophetic writings. And then Jesus comes and blows the whole thing wide open for us. “Killer god” turns out to not be the final word on who God is.
Amen to that. Referring to God as “God the killer” and the implications of that statement border on blasphemy and as you have said are untrue.
You mean the God portrayed from one end of the Bible to the other, as the greatest mass murderer of all time, isn’t? I agree completely. The Bible blasphemes Him.
Woah there . The bible blashpemes God? well thats new. There are good answers to God beign a mass murdered but the word of God blashpemes God?
I utterly refute God the Killer, despite the overwhelming proclamation of Him in the Bible. Creating God the Merciful, Just, Killer is just as heretical, blasphemous to God as revealed in Jesus. As Jesus says. Twice. [As we’re keen to proclaim the horribly threatening hard sayings of Jesus, why aren’t we as keen to proclaim His wonderful, inclusive, universalist one? Why do we limit the hard sayings to their worst interpretation?]
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Like for instance when God ordered the cannanites to be destroyed i mean there was no alternative in my opinion. They were corrupting the Isralites and they would possibly prevent the birth of the saviour. So God kinda step on history.Was it moral? Well i dont think the cannanites were gonna change their sinful behaviour
I understand Nick. I’ve argued that and a lot worse. I can’t now. [I don’t find it necessary to at all.]
I would say that the issue is that there is more than one kind of truth or meaning. If we look at the night sky we could see the glory of God, as beautiful sight, or examples of nuclear fission. All of these are accurate descriptions, that is they are true. Sadly too often modern people think that there is only one truth and that is “scientific” truth.
We have the events found in Genesis which convey spiritual truth and this is what Jesus and the Bible is about. They also conveyed what were thought to be historical facts and scientific facts, which were based on the facts as best the people knew them. In other words I would say that the facts are in the Bible because people thought them to be true, not because they were true because they were in the Bible.
The main issue is are these facts spiritually true, because this is all that the Bible claims to do, show forth God plan of salvation. The Hebrews took the story of Noah which was thought to be true and was used to convey pagan spiritual ideas, and adapted it to fit the history of Israel and convey Jewish spiritual ideas. The scientific facts are wrong, and the history is unclear, but the spiritual meaning is solid or true. .
As for the flood account i dont think its entirely myth. Some flood accounts actually did happen well not on global scale though .
I don’t understand what you’re asking.
Though not as ancient as Moses, have you also considered the cultural satire of Jonah?
I mean it’s a story about a prophet who would have been a few hundred years old by the time the story was wrote. It’s a northern kingdom prophet who thought he could flee God by running from God. He fled so that he would not have to help the pagan heathens of Nineveh repent to find gods mercy. He ended up on a ship of pagan heathens and was willing to die for them.
He gets cast overboard a ship that was thinking it should break itself up when to please God Jonah was tossed over by the pagans who then make scarified ( I assume of atonement involving fire ) and Jonah was swallowed by a male fish and three days later the fish threw up Jonah and was now a female
Fish. The city is known to be small and had no king but was portrayed as a giant city with 120,000 citizens and had a king.
He preaches the message to the Assyrians and they accept it and repent and goes as far as to make their animals wear sack cloths.
Jonah still believes God is going to destroy them and so he goes up a to watch. But God does not. Jonah tried to sit in the shade and so god makes a plant grow to keep him in the shadow. Then the next day the plant dies and God directly calls out Jonah for being sad and having compassion for the dead plant but no compassion for the pagans who were so dumb they can’t tell their right from their left hands.
Job suffered everything but death at Satan’s hand. I’d call that controlling behaviour on the part of Satan. As it was in taking Jesus to the top of the temple and a mountain (which one eh?). Literally… or symbolically.
It’s precisely because of how the NT writers treat Genesis that I think at the very least we should accept a historical Adam and Eve.
But this doesn’t mean the NT writers treated Genesis 1-11 as ‘history’ in the modern sense of the word. They’re less concerned with historical events and more with the theology that these ancient stories proclaim.
From what I’ve read so far, Genesis 1-11 is written in ‘high poetical prose’ which is not quite full-on poetry and mythology, and is also not simple historical narrative. The story gives us real truths that I think have at least some historical relevance, but can be argued to be heavily immersed in the mythologies and culture of the time to serve a theological purpose.
A nuanced view of Genesis 1-11 might, for instance, accept a ‘federal head’ Adam who was perhaps an early leader of a people group, who was the first person God revealed himself and his mission to and this ‘image of God’ spread to the rest of humanity, and whose rebellion also caused all of humanity to fall.
In the end we can’t really know, but it’s the theology that I think really matters here. We were dead in Adam, but we are made alive in the New Adam - Jesus!
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Aye, this seems reasonable. I have heard at least that the people living at the time of Genesis’s writing were much more interested in the theology of what was being said in these stories than their historicity.
The events of “proto-history” I heard from one scholar are events that everyone in these cultures agreed happened but the way they were interpreted and portrayed and what that said about what we would call theological and philosophical questions are what was important to them.
And there are real events behind these stories from what I’ve read. The Garden of Eden matches perfectly the Persian Gulf Oasis and there was a huge regional flood in the area also coinciding with massive floodings of coastal areas and rain storms at the end of the Younger Dryas period.
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Do you believe everything you read?