We? Please speak for yourself.
By âweâ I meant all competent biblical scholars in universities around the world.
All competent scholars? And thatâs why we have contradictory elements in Genesis now? I donât believe you. The chiastic structure of Genesis 7 is an important interpretive key that you are free to use or not.
Every scholar who does not salivate over inerrancy knows the Pentateuch is composed of numerous sources with contradictory details that have been edited together. Mosaic authorship or even a unified and consistent Pentateuch is about as realistic as a flat earth. I will make a new thread soon outlining all the evidence soon. I am writing an article on it now. The evidence is overwhelming.
Vinnie
Is that supposed to be an insult to competent scholars who hold to inerrancy as a faith commitment?
Iâm convinced most forms of inerrancy preclude one from conducting legitimate research and forming legitimate conclusions about the Pentateuch. That is why outside of fundamentalist camps and evangelical literalists, virtually no one denies diverse sources were edited together in the Pentateuch.
Vinnie
Iâm sure God did not err in communicating what he intended in what has been passed down to us. I know that many think Bonhoeffer is over the top in this, but he has the essence correct:
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The chiastic structure of Genesis 7 is a legitimate way to read the passage as a whole without it contradicting itself.
That would be those who consider the Bible to be the word of God⌠and thus containing profound insight into the human condition and who we are. The frank truth is that this question of historicity makes a HUGE difference to the meaning we take away from the story of the flood. What we read in that story is that every imagination of the thoughts of menâs hearts were only evil continually and for this reason God regretted that God ever created mankind at all. Whether that is true seems to be a very important thing to me.
It doesnât require a global flood if humanity really did start with two people, because then there is a time when human civilization was a local entity and thus a local flood could have indeed wiped it out. And this doesnât conflict with evolution if humanity is more than just a biological species but also required a communication from God.
This is not a black and white either-or choice between whether the text has human authors or God is the author, because God is capable of using people as his instruments â both in the writing of the text and in bringing about the events themselves.
Just hop in the minivan and move to a different part of the US, is that it. How modern times distorts our understanding of what is possible!
That regret was for the cost to the earth and not for the people who died. God wasnât sure mankind was worth the price of its redemption. So God changed strategies in his dealings with mankind to make sure He was never put in such a position again. He made sure there would never be only one human civilization ever again, but many.
The Flood has to be a real event otherwise the entire text is false and we are lost. If you want to call it a parable, which is a made-up story then you put the entire Bible into question as to whether the other events described in it are real or made-up.
This is why I was saying you might as well take a book written about Zeus and twist it to fit reality. Itâs the same thing. Or take the Lord of the Rings and believe Gandalf was a real person who did magic. Either it is real and fits with reality, or it is myth. If it is myth, it needs to be discarded, burned up and done away with for all the misery and confusion it has caused throughout history. Then the Catholic organisation can start giving out reparations.
Starting with belief is a bad idea. Even Thomas wasnât that stupid and gullible. It must have evidence and it must fit into reality. ONLY then can we venture to actually believe it.
Most Christians I suppose have their belief in the Bible formed through the teaching of Jesus. If it wasnât for Jesus and his view of the Bible, I donât think there would be many people with a high view of it today.
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Not only that ⌠if it wasnât for Jesus almost nobody would have even heard of âthe Bibleâ today except for some tiny sect of Jews. The only reason so much of the world even cares at all about the Hebrew Scriptures today is entirely because of Christ, and not the other way around. Early apostles and disciples already had âthe Bibleâ, and if that was going to be it ⌠they were just gonna go back to fishing (and did). Big whoop. It was the risen Christ coming on the scene that turned their lives (and understanding of scriptures) upside down.
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I agree God did not err in communicating what he intended. That goes without saying to me. Now we may naturally disagree on what we think God intended to communicate. I also find great wisdom in parts of the Bonhoeffer quote but it is very vague and generic. When someone offers me a hermeneutic of sorts for scripture, whether it be Bonhoeffer or someone on this forum claiming gender comments in the Bible are cultural, I want to cross-examine it and see how it applies to other parts of scripture. I agree that whatever we may think of various layers of tradition that if we accept inspiration, its the final redaction of the Biblical text that is inspired. That is why I find narrative criticism invaluable. But I do not believe in forcing one gospel (or story in the Pentateuch) to fit with another. Yes, there is a canonical dimension to scripture but its not as easy to find the overall meaning as just force fitting everything together through mental gymnastics. I can only conclude God left us with four different views of Jesus for a reason. Now there is certainly a lot of overlap between them but again, there is diversity as well. At the end of the day I think we are meant to wrestle with scripture. We are meant to prayerfully dig deeper and deeper.
And I think this quote from Stein catches more nuance for me than the Bonhoeffer one:
It doesnât follow that if I think the flood was mythological I cannot believe Jesus was God incarnate. Your âall or nothingâ mantra has been addressed many times previously in the thread you made about Genesis and the dream sequence to which you never responded. I am a Christ-ian, not a Bible-ian. I follow Jesus. The Gospels were written in relatively short order from the time of Jesusâs death and its historically certain to me that many of his first followers genuinely believed he rose from the dead. The flood account would need to be thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of years old (depending on which local flood proponent you ask) and is steeped so thoroughly in ancient Mesopotamian myth, it scarcely has any historical value except telling us what those at the time it was written may have believed.
I accept the canon but believe in softer models of inspiration and I certainly have no qualms finding a âcanon within the canonâ or rejecting parts of it. As I noted, parts of scripture reject other parts of scripture. Jewish rabbis (including Jesus) have long known and pitted parts of scripture against other parts. The heart and soul of the Bible for me is the fourfold Gospel.
As @heymike3 and @Mervin_Bitikofer said, the reason I use the OT at all is because Jesus and early Christians did and they tie him into Jewish salvation history. The question is not âdid this happen?â The question to ask is âwhat does this teach me about God and my relationship with Him?â. Iâm about a stoneâs throw away from being a Marcionite and that is in spite of me recognizing the continuity between the Old and New Testaments. But the truth is, while the angry God of the OT may show up in the NT I as a Christ-ian donât compare testaments. I compare everything to Jesus. He is my standard and even then any understanding of Jesus or proper Christology has to account for his human limitations and they we was a 2,000 year old cultural Jew.
I have an article here: Did Jesus believe in a literal flood that is relevant.
I also have an article "If Noahâs ark is fiction, what about the resurrection? Both seem relevant to your questions.
I donât study the Bible and determine its true and believe in Jesus. I had an encounter with the transforming and risen Jesus while reading the Gospels. All other beliefs are just me doing theology, trying to rationalize things and justify my beliefs. I strongly believe ârational justificationâ naturally comes after a salvific experience. Making the saving grace of God dependent on our ability to become clever historians or apologists is not Biblical. It borders on idolatry.
The flood account can provide profound inside into the human condition and who we are with or without being historical. Just as the Garden story can provide insight even if there wasnât a magic tree, a talking snake, or to use your terminology, âgolemsâ created from the dust in the ground.
Every time someone in scripture says âallâ in scripture what I read is hyperbole. History again does not matter. The flood could be using extremely well known and widely believed mythology to teach that mankind is wicked, sinful and needs God for salvation. This point can be absolutely true whether or not the flood story happened. Am I to actually believe every woman, child and every single man on the planet was all completely evil? In Genesis 18 God refuses to sweep away the righteous with the wicked. Do children not count in this?
Sure, a global flood is not required to kill localized people but what the bible teaches is something different. But as far as humanity starting with two people, I find the garden story in its final form probably says more about the Babylonian exile than some "first couple. "Are you going to go William Lane Craig and push the garden story back 800,000 years or some crazy number? Poor Lightfoot and Usher must be turning in their graves.
You jumped the shark here. Humans have wandered and migrated throughout history. You are the one with the modern distortion of what is possible. We have two choices from what I see:
Noah migrates with his family a hundred miles (or however big you think this small local flood was) which was a common practice for humans for a very long time.
Noah, a 500 year old man spends God knows how long (100 years?) acquiring all sorts of wood for his boat, chopping it down, dragging it home, sizing it, building platforms and actually constructing an impossibly large wooden ship (half the size of the titanic?) that doesnât buckle under its own weight and has to withstand the tumultuous waves of a monstrous floodâŚI think it might be more reasonable to imagine Noah actually jumping into a minivan⌠Didnât some Jewish rabbis say he must have planted the trees used for the ARK 150 years before the flood? Unless you want to argue Noah, his family and a few pets just floated on a small skiff or dinghy?
My point was the the whole concept of an ARK implies to me this was how he would needed to be saved. At best you can make up a story about humanity that the text says is already deemed beyond repair, being giving extra warnings from Noah as he built the unnecessary boat. The whole concept of taking two of each animals (or 7!) is about repopulating the land afterwards. But animals outside the 100 mile (or again, whatever you imagine the flood distance to be) can simply migrate back in. None of this is necessary. The story is clearly universal in scope and localizing it renders many of its details pointless. Countless young earth creationists, despite their mishandling of science, clearly recognize the obvious here.
And I am not sure why should I believe Noah and the details of Genesis 6-9 are anymore literal history anymore than those I find in the Epic of Atrahasis.
There wasnât one human civilization at this time. Humans were spread out unless you again, think the flood occurred 800,000 years ago (or insert other number here).
Iâm listening⌠I outlined the chiastic structure here but it still consists of two stories with contradictory details woven together.
Vinnie
There appears to be a nuance that you did not pick up on:
Only that that is not the method which will reveal to us the heart of the Bible, but only the surface, just as we do not grasp the words of someone we love by taking them to bits, but by simply receiving them, so that for days they go on lingering in our minds, simply because they are the words of a person we love; and just as these words reveal more and more of the person who said them as we go on, like Mary, âpondering them in our heart,â so it will be with the words of the Bible.
The chiastic structure in Genesis 7 allows the passage to be read as a single literary unit free from contradiction. Iâm not saying you have to read it that way, but it is possible to do that.
On the surface of the Bible, in addition to a million positive things, I see misogyny, slavery, slaughtering of women and children, murder, rape, questionable morality, and a lot of bad cosmology. At the end of the day, the Bible has been used to justify too much evil throughout history for me to just receive the surface meaning of the Bible. I donât believe the Bible is infallible as apparently you and Bonhoeffer do. I actually find that is turning the Bible into a forth member of the trinityâexpanding the triune Godhead into a Quartet. Father, Son, Holy Spirit and Bible. Of the conservative posture on the Bible, Rodger L. Cragun wrote:
âIt has elevated the Bible itself to equality with God. In short it has led the Church into idolatry. The Bible has become something to be worshipped. The doctrine claims that the Bible is exactly what God says and thinks in all time and throughout eternity. Extrapolating on the statement in the new testament that âJesus is the Word,â inerrancy equates scripture with God, expanding the Triune God to a Quartet: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and the Word, the Bible.â Ultimate Heresy xxi
While I accept a soft form of inspiration, the Bible we read comes from a human publisher, not heaven. My trust is in God and the Holy Spirit and the transforming and living Jesus. As Dale B Martin wrote:
We may trust scripture to provide what we need for our salvation. We may trust that we can read scripture in prayerful hope that God will speak to us through our reading that text. But ultimately this belief-or, perhaps better put, this stance, attitude, or habitus-is actually an expression of our faith not in a text but in God and the holy spirit. We âleave it up to the holy spiritâ to protect us from damnable error in our readings of scripture. We depend on God to keep us with God in our readings of scripture. Properly understood, the doctrine of the infallibility of scripture is a statement less about a text and more about God." [The Meaning of Scripture in the Twenty-first Century]
I think that statement blows Bonhoeffer out of the water.
I am asking how. Here is what I have on the flood. Now please note, the two flood stories come after two creation stories and two genealogies in Genesis 4-5.
The Two Flood Narratives in Genesis 6-9: Ken Sparks (ibid) writes, âDo the parallel sources continue into the flood story? At first glance, the flood story itself impresses us as a single, coherent story. Nevertheless, a close inspection reveals that it too was based on two older sources that have been combined into one. Each of these stories has a distinctive beginning, chronology, and ending. In the first of these stories (the Yahweh version), Noah brought seven pairs of each clean animal onto the ark. He and the animals entered the ark seven days before the flood began because Yahweh commanded them to do so: âGo into the ark. . . . Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth. . . . And Noah did all that the Lord commanded. . . . And after seven days the floodwaters came on the earthâ (see 7:1â5, 10 NIV). After a flood of forty days and forty nights, Noah exited the ark and offered sacrifices to Yahweh. Yahweh then responded with a promise: âNever again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have doneâ (8:21 NIV). Yahweh also removed the curse that he had placed on the ground after Adamâs sin in Genesis 3 (cf. 3:17; 8:21). Notice that this curse motif thematically connects the Yahwistic flood story with the Yahwistic creation-fall story in Genesis 2â3. Hence we seem to have a coherent Yahwistic story that includes three parts: creation (chaps. 2â3), genealogy (chap. 4), and flood (chaps. 6â9).â
We see that the flood account, even with its marvelous chiastic structure, is two accounts in one. Joseph Blekinsopp observes: âThe arguments which have led scholars to postulate a combination of sources are fairly straightforward and have never been refuted. There are inconsistencies with respect to what was brought into the ark, the chronology, and perhaps the manner in which the deluge was brought about. We hear of one pair, male and female, of each species (6:19-20; 7:14-16), but also of seven pairs of clean and one pair of unclean animals (7:2-3, 8-9). We are told that the flood lasted 40 days (7:4, 12, 17; 8:6), or sixty-one, counting every day until the ground dried out (8:6-12), but we also hear of a duration of one hundred and fifty days (7:24; 8:3), a figure compatible with the five months from the beginning to the grounding of the ark on Ararat (8:4). While the description of the disaster as a downpour of rain (7:4, 12; 8:2) is not necessarily incompatible with the more mythological language of the bursting forth of the fountains of the great deep (7:11; 8:2) it is more natural to think of the latter as providing a quite distinctive perspective, especially if read in the larger context of Genesis 1-11.
We have often been reminded that repetition is not in itself an indication of the composite nature of a narrative . . . and with this we may readily agree. But the situation is rather different when we encounter parallel versions of episodes in which the parallels consistently exhibit distinctive characteristics. So, for example, Noah is told to board the ark with family members and specifically designated livestock. He does so, and then the command is repeated with the same people and differently designated livestock, and he does so again (6:18b-21, 22; 7:1-5). In such cases it is unreasonable to exclude editorial activity carried out according to canons somewhat different from those we would follow today." [The Pentateuch, pp 77-78]
Two stories with contradictory details were ingenious woven together into a chiastic structure. Do you disagree with this statement?
I love you, LORD, my strength.
Psalm 18:1
What is the person in the pew to do, fret about whether or not David actually said that or ponder whether or not they can echo it?
How a passage that is seemingly contradictory can have a chiastic structure? I donât understand the question.
That is a no-brainer. The latter. Authorship is irrelevant.
But what âis the person in the pew to doâ here:
Psalm 137:9: âHappy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.â
Do they question it or âponder whether or not they can echo it?â
When scripture is used by believers to imply 90% (or whatever #) of human history will all burn in hell and endure eternal conscious torment for eternity, shall I âponder whether or not I can echo itâ?
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