The old enemy of my enemy is my friend kind of thinking.
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Take out evolitionistic and put in how you do the Lord’s supper, or baptism, or perhaps even the idea of the Trinity, as that was not verbalized for another 300 years. Or perhaps put in heliocentrism or germ theory (tiny invisible beings cause disease?- What a ridiculous idea! Everyone knows it is the judgement of God, or maybe to glorify him when healed, for the enlightened.) Or maybe weather predictions.
In other words, I suspect you would be shuffled on down the road with any of those ideas.
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I’m not sure if anyone should bother, since you already have the first three questions and responses mapped out.
I don’t know for certain what Peter or Paul might say about it, but I am completely comfortable standing before my Lord with what I believe, which I argue would be much more pertinent.
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Sure. As the sign over the church door said, “Sinners enter here. All saints please report directly to heaven.”
So believing in evolution is the same as willful sexual sin? Who would have thunk it. I think you have a plank in your eye that you need to attend to.
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Peter famously did not want to allow Gentiles entrance into the New Testament church. God had a little difference of opinion with him, if I recall correctly.
James famously judged between Paul and the Judaizers — folks who wanted to add new church-entrance requirements on top of belief in the Lord Jesus, the grace of God, and the fellowship of His Holy Spirit. James gave a couple of comments in response…
Acts 15:19 "Therefore it is my judgment that we do not trouble those who are turning to God from among the Gentiles, 20 but that we write to them that they abstain from things contaminated by idols and from fornication and from what is strangled and from blood. 21 For Moses from ancient generations has in every city those who preach him, since he is read in the synagogues every Sabbath.”
Interesting that I don’t see “belief in young-earth creationism” in there…
Beloved disciple John, meanwhile, gave love as his defining criterion:
“1 John 4:7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.”
Yes, sir! Peter’s sermons in Acts are pretty clear: Jesus is Lord! Repent and be baptized! Sounds like the gospel I’ve given my life to believe and follow. I don’t remember him saying anything about Adam, much less humans riding on dino-back.
So perhaps, dear brother, before cutting off a large portion of the Church of your Lord and presuming that you know how the “foundation of the apostles and prophets” might rule in your favor, you might take a few moments to read the Scriptures again. You might be surprised what you find.
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(Honestly, if I were you, @r_speir, I’d be more afraid of the harsh words Paul might reserve for you, trying to multiply church entrance requirements that aren’t from God… Lord have mercy!)
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@r_speir 's response outline:
- Pick off the one thing you think you can refute, and respond to it
- Ignore all the parts of a response that completely dismantle your fragile argument
- Pick something you disagree with and call it a distraction, even though it’s perfectly relevant and, in fact, the heart of the matter.
Let’s see how many more times he does this before he gets tired of losing arguments and repeating the same things and leaves…
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I would like to take this opportunity to remind people of the guidelines:
Focus on discussing other people’s ideas, not on evaluating their character, faith, communication style, or perceived “tone.
Assume legitimate Christian faith on the part of other people, unless they identify otherwise. The purpose of discussions here is not to judge the legitimacy or efficacy of anyone’s faith or lack of faith.
State your case and then respect other people’s right to agree or disagree. Avoid repeating the same ideas over and over because you have failed to convince everyone to accept your viewpoint.
@r_speir It’s not appropriate for you to make pronouncements directed at specific posters about whose beliefs are going to hold up at the throne of God and whose aren’t. Please avoid this kind of thing.
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Perhaps it is because we see disagree on the what the subject is at hand? It would help to clarify this.
The problem seems to be, you’re trying to appeal to some sort of conscience in us of wrongdoing, as if we’re going to say, “Oh gee, you caught me… I really do believe the Bible and the early church would reject me and my ‘heretical’ beliefs, but I’ve been trying to hide it… Gosh, now that you put it that way, I repent in sackcloth and ashes.” Most of us don’t believe that our evolutionary creationist beliefs are a criterion for rejection from the historic Church. So you can’t shame us into repentance. It just won’t work.
So how about, instead, you discuss the Biblical and scientific evidence for your position, and tell us clearly what it is? Tell us what your true “subject matter” is, clearly. And then maybe we can make rational progress… but honestly I doubt it, given that you came in swinging and show no interest in seeing logic in anyone but yourself. Perhaps (I hope) you’ll prove me wrong?
By the way, I tried to delete my last smart-aleck comment, but the Forum software here didn’t let me… some sort of browser problem. [Edit: Thanks, invisible moderators, for deleting it!] My tone was getting a bit nasty and zinger-y, and I aspire to do better.
Actually I went point by point through everyone who you said would reject me and my beliefs, and told you, based on actual evidence from the New Testament, why they would accept me.
You have responded by ignoring my painstaking, point-by-point argument (which took a good bit of time, by the way), and by then repeating your unbiblical prejudices, dressed up as orthodoxy.
Not sure where to go from here.
Now, so that I’m not guilty of what I’m accusing you of: It is true that the Old Testament prophesied the inclusion of the Gentiles, and so Peter was perhaps more obviously out of step with God’s heart than you are.
But the point remains that, if you look at the actual text of Acts 10, Cornelius and his household were accepted into God’s family when the Holy Spirit infilled them after they accepted the truth of wonderful, bold preaching about Jesus that had nothing to do with Adam. If Peter came to my house and preached what he preached — and the Holy Spirit does (in fact, already) indwell me — then I would have said “Amen! Preach it!” So… how you have Peter rejecting me… is beyond me, and certainly beyond the Biblical text.
But maybe you have a different Bible?
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“If you declare with your mouth ‘Jesus is Lord’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”(Romans 10:9). So yeah, I’m good, no matter what I believe about evolution.
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The church of the early New Testament is certainly important. But you should be able to admit that Jesus Christ is our Lord. It is to Him that we will answer one day. I love Him and have zero doubts that He loves me and has made me part of His family.
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Okay, so those of us with EC views would be banned from church fellowship in a distant culture in a distant time period. So what? I’d probably be banned on the basis of being a woman who wears pants and attained an education anyway. Your question seems predicated on the idea that none of the apostles could ever make a mistake, or that communication with the Holy Spirit renders every decision correct, in which case Christians would never disagree on anything.
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I think (s)he might, in fact, be saying that Christians™ never disagree on anything.
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I think someone else kind of summed up a solid response to this. Let’s me just say that the theory of evolution would have been thoroughly rejected by anyone. They would have had virtually no evidence for the idea in their time. What kinds of things do we now have lots of knowledge about that make up the scientific idea?
- Fossils. Like all of them. And all the transitional fossils too. We didn’t even know species could go extinct. We didn’t have loads of fossils lined up to even compare the morphology.
- Not just their existence and comparative morphology, but where they are distributed around the globe as well as distribution in strata.
- Genes/DNA. None of that, what you can see with just your senses is all that existed. We could not compare the genes say for the sense of smell between dogs, humans and other mammals.
- Not just these, but then there’s vestigial structures and vestigial genes, etc.
Literally for me to take the idea of the theory of evolution and proclaim it as truth in first century Near East… with absolutely no evidence is insanity. But today, the question is quite different because we do have lots and lots of evidence to deal with.
Bonus edit: for me to also go around proclaiming we are rotating at 250,000 stadia per day at a distance of 930,000,000 stadia away from the sun would also have been insanity unless I could have demonstrated such using mathematics and physics that nobody knew existed.
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