Um . . . not really; it’s used in Ezekiel to refer to a choice between two paths, or to the splitting of a path into two depending on how you read it. In the rest of the OT though it seems to always reference a human mother.
The term can be rendered as “shining one”, which manages to bridge the two aspects due to its use to mean heavenly beings.
Repetition does not indicate the start of a process, it makes the meaning emphatic. Thus “Holy, holy” should be rendered as “truly holy”, and “die you shall die” becomes “you shall certainly die”.
Oh – and you got the Hebrew wrong anyway; it’s “mowt tamut”, though “dying you shall die” is a perfectly good rendition.
This is VERY bad thinking! When discussing a common issue the common meaning of terms are used. I once saw a debate team in the quarter-finals for state championship lose because they used a non-standard definition and the other team caught it – and that rule of debate is the usual one for any communication. If you want to mean something else, invent a different term because no one is going to bother with talking to someone who uses personal meanings for words.
That is acceptable generally but usually is only done when your definition is only slightly different from the established usage. Read a few hundred research papers where such definitions are given and you’ll see the pattern.
That’s silly – using a term with its standard meaning doesn’t entail accepting the ideas, it only entails speaking of the ideas as they exist.
You left out the part he’s referencing, where Paul says “they knew God”. This “they” reaches back to the start of the argument, thus Paul is talking about people who knew God.
Except that you’re offering those points as assertions, which means making statements without backing them up. Since you’re making the statements, it’s up to you to back them up – which Christy indirectly invited you to do.
Nope – the Holy Spirit reduced the entire set of instructions from the Old Testament to four items. That’s in Acts 15, and there’s no way around it because the laws of Moses were explicitly included in the discussions.
Now the problem comes out: that is an element of a modern worldview that did not apply to the thinking of the ancient near east. Back then, if something came from a deity it had authority, and it was the authority that mattered, not the type of material. So if God inspired something, it made no difference if it was “literally” true or not because it came from God. The division was between things with divine authority and things lacking them.
Total failure to understand the quote you used! There’s no reference to “fiction”, broad or speculative or otherwise, but you jump to that as though the quote has any relevance to it.
The text doesn’t say that. Take thorns; they must have existed or Adam & Eve wouldn’t have known what God was talking about – but what God is saying is that those plants will now get in the way of raising food. The same is true of death.
With disease and cancer you might have a point, but there’s nothing in the text to hang that idea on.
It should also be noted that they were being booted from the Garden, and God could have just been telling them what they were stuck with due to that.
No, it doesn’t – any notion of sin is purely imported.
“If the proofs of separation existed” is a phrase that imports an a priori notion, which is always a fallacious argument.
And just by the way, we know that predators killing prey for food is “good”, because the Psalmist tells us so – even says that God provides the prey!
This indicates that the meaning of “good” is not the one imported from twenty-first century Western culture.
Not quite: death of humans is the result of sin, and it flows from spiritual death. Animals aren’t spiritual beings, so this doesn’t apply to them.
Bad Christology: Jesus’ resurrected body belongs to the New Creation – and Paul puts it, Jesus is the first fruits.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
The first I learned as “royal chronicle”, though it seems that term is used differently today. It is a genre that aims to set forth a mighty accomplishment of a great king, doing so in memorable terms that can be poetic and can use chronology as an organizing means not meant to be literal. The second has been called “temple inauguration”, which is a type that starts with the construction of the temple, proceeds with filling it, and ends up with the deity coming to “rest” in the temple, which means not the cessation of activity but rather a change in activity based on enjoying the proper functioning of the building and filling. We know this is the case because Jesus Himself told the Pharisees that “My Father is working till now”.
The order of events is relevant because the Israelites would have known the Egyptian story and recognized that the Genesis writer was following it but also was changing things. The account takes each element of the Egyptian story but instead of something being a god (for instance the sea) it is presented as merely a creation of YHWH-Elohim; in fact two primary gods of Egypt, the sun and moon, are slammed heavily because they don’t even get named by the Hebrew writer!
Without knowing the first genre the message that God is king over Creation is lost; it can be drawn from elsewhere but to the ancient Israelites it would have been blaringly obvious. Without knowing the second the message that Creation is God’s temple is lost; again, that can be drawn from elsewhere but also again to the original audience it would have been obvious. And without knowing that the writer copied the order of events from the Egyptian story the point that every Egpytian god of importance was reduced to just a tool made by YHWH-Elohim to serve His purpose is completely lost – a message that in modern slang terms might be summed up as “All your gods are belong to YHWH!”
Actually I didn’t fail; the prime criterion is the effort to have understood the ancient worldview, the ancient literary type, and the cultural context. YEC advocates operate on the assumption that they don’t need to study, that they can read in English and the words mean what they look like to them. That’s the same arrogance the pope had that led to the Reformation and the same arrogance of false teachers down through history.
And get pounced on by others – it happens rather often, really. But the positions that are argued and accepted by the majority of scholars can generally be trusted.
With reference to that, the information about genres that I’ve related was known over twenty-five years ago and has only been made more sure since then.
What, that they don’t deal with the text honestly? I have yet to find one that does, because they all operate on the unrecognized assumption that their basic premise is taken from scientific materialism, without a trace of it being found in the scriptures.
Basic physics – if the hydroplate conjecture happened, there would be a large blob of vapor instead of a planet since the heat produced would vaporize the planet.
Physics isn’t generally much use for evolution.
Shifting the goalposts – another fallacious argument.
What we know from the text is that the first mention of sin is in Genesis 3 – and that it started before humans rebelled.
I refuted that: Genesis is not necessary for the Gospel to be “stable” for the simple reason that people already know they are broken.
Yes, I read it, and it is not the entire point of the Old Testament.
If you think those requirements are “unsubstantiated” you have no business in any serious conversation but need to go back to school.
And the rest is my story or common knowledge among scholars.
No, “fairytales” is the key word because it shows that you have no concept that there is any position but yours and the caricature you hold of anything else.
As I learned them, royal chronicle, temple inauguration, myth (the technical term), and . . . drat it, I can’t recall the fourth I was thinking of.
Because if you don’t know the genre of the literature you’re reading you can’t possibly understand what the writer was talking about or what the audience understood from the writing.
Two genres in the Creation account, at least four in Genesis 1 - 11.
The train ticket is new. Without it you walked. Walking was good, but now you’ve moved on and get to ride the train.
What was “very good” for an Earthly existence may well be superseded by something as much different as riding a train is to walking.