Maybe because I find it incoherent and ill-thought out.
you wrote:
It seems to me that your main “beef” is with my not accepting early Genesis as history? As if that affects my reading of the rest of Scripture? Only if you take the bible as one complete unified text, and I do not. It was cobbled together by a committee. Perhaps God was chairman?
My beef is with the unbelief that God would have anything to do with the message contained in the Scripture. After that we can figure out what the text meant. Yes, I believe early Genesis is history, but more importantly I believe that God inspired that message and it is afterwards up to us to try to figure out what it means.
I am going to alter 1 Thes 2:13 to your view of Scripture which you say is cobbled together by a committee.
For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when ye received the cobbled together output of an ancient human writing committee which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of God, but as it is in truth, the word of ** an ancient human committee of writers**
Sounds like something everyone is going to want to hear about–the output of a committee. Churches will be full to the brim over this kind of thing, with people standing and sitting in the aisles to hear the commettee’s latest cobbling.
Blockquote
Really, you have a romantic view of the origins of Scripture that is not realistic. It is by human hand, witnessing about how God has been revealed, rather than a specific instruction manual sent from God that you need to read before living.
Oh gee, no one calls me a romantic, not even my wife. Thank you for being the first to do so. Do flowers come with it? lol
I have a view that says I don’t care what humans say about the matters of eternity. Such things are of no interest or value to me. I am quite interested in what God says about the matters of eternity because He, unlike any human, knows what is on the other side. Human speculations about Heaven, hades, Nirvana etc are the mutterings of the blind. None of us have been to the other side of death or gone into eternity and come back to tell us what was there. Neither David, nor Moses nor Paul at the time he was writing had been there. Thus, their “witnessing about how God has been revealed” is not that of an actual witness. They saw nothing and thus can have nothing to say. Only if the message is from God can it have any weight because He and Jesus are the ONLY witnesses to what eternity is like. Thus, the opinions of your committee of writers is of no interest to me.
Yes God could have created the Garden of Eden and all the wonders within. Yes God can make animals speak. He has done and still does still do miraculous things. But, Scripture is not just a record of what God has done. It is more than just history.
And I gather while you believe God could have done things as written, you have a lack of belief that he did the things written there. I don’t think the Bible commends Abraham for his lack of belief.
So let’s see how your unbelief affects your view of Genesis. You don’t even try to see if there is an interpretation of it which would make it be true. My guess is that you don’t believe in the story of the Fall either, which is the one thing Jesus’ death was designed to overcome.
Over in https://discourse.biologos.org/t/my-story-an-intellectual-journey/41726/12 the 11th post is my account of my debate with Henry Morris III. It was posted with you in mind since you think I am just a YEC, which shows how little actual research on me you have done. In that debate I presented a theological case for old earth and an evolutionary way to read the Genesis 1. My goal was to undermine the YEC claim that they are the only ones with a historical reading of Genesis. The accommodationalist view of Genesis, that it is nothing but faerie tales, plays right into the YEC’s hands.
And frankly I agree with the YECs that if God didn’t get his message into the Bible in a way that is largely true, both scientifically and historically, then the Christian God is clueless about creation, impotent at getting his message to mankind, and He becomes something like Plato’s demiurge, cut off from humanity by his inability to communicate with us. If that is the kind of God you want, have at it.