I don not know what you mean? The Torah is basically the old covenant…so I need you to expand on that. The Protestant bible vs the Catholic bible…??? I thought I could answer but have no clue where you are going with this. Different in what way? Because this is news to me. Are they teaching different doctrines, somehow contradicting one another?
Genesis 1-11 alone ties into either directly or indirectly every Christian doctrine. Why is there sin? what brought into the word? why is Jesus called the last Adam? etc…etc…
then you have to jettison the whole Bible because the facts of the world around us show it to be false.
The so called, “facts of the world” is merely an observation, an illusion if you will brought about by a worldview devoid of God. In layman terms, it’s a best guess. Scripture has shown me time and time again that it can be trusted; therefore the bible has proven an excellent track record with me. Evolutionary science has not.
At least to me, the more prudent choice is to jettison a bad interpretation instead of the whole thing.
There lies the problem with theistic evolutionists. A bad interpretation is when someone misinterprets what the passage is suppose to mean based on the context of the passage. What you are doing is making yourself the standard of God’s word. And that is the difference between you and I. You have made yourself the judge of scripture and I have made myself a slave to scripture.
And you jettison reality.
Please don’t assume i don’t give the Bible a high priority. It’s just when reality conflicts with what a chapter says. It would be unwise to keep believing it Instead of looking if we made a mistake interpreting it.
So reality is secular and you live in a fantasy?
How can you say that it’s a presupposition? I have seen the YEC “evidence” And it was the reason i stopped accepting the YEC view. It’s the same for you though, Your default position is what the people at AIG,CMI,ICR say.
Everything you are saying I do, can be said for you as well.
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The foundation of the Christian faith is derived from various interpretations of the Bible. We have 100 or so Christian denominations because there is no agreement as to what the words mean. Apparently God doesn’t care or likes to hear humans argue or planed it this way or is running parallel experiments using parallel universes or . . . .
We might argue about interpretations like Me and Wookin. But we all see each other as brothers and sisters in Christ.
Sure you can know the gospel without reading the Bible. How do you think the gospel originally spread? Even now, most Christians initially heard the gospel from other Christians, not from picking up a Bible on their own. Most Christians are discipled into the Christian faith by other Christians who teach them how to interpret what the Bible says, they don’t just pick up a Bible and figure it out in a vacuum. There are multiple accounts of people becoming followers of Christ in the Muslim world because of dreams or visions. God does not need the Bible to draw people to himself. Furthermore, when you are taught by a church “what the Bible says” you are being initiated into a certain interpretive tradition that goes beyond just what the text of the Bible says and you are being told what it means, it’s not like you are having pure truth injected into your brain direct from God.
Yes, obviously the Bible testifies to who Christ is. So did all the apostles and early Christian gospel workers who instructed the early church before the Bible existed, and those who worked together (we believe under the influence of the Holy Spirit) to form the creeds and decide the canon and confront heresies and pass along the apostolic tradition to the next generation. The Bible is not this magical thing that mediates our salvation. Reiterating again that we use the Bible to inform and defend the tenets of our faith is not going to prove your point that the Bible is the “foundation” of our faith.
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The Hebrew canon contains 24 books, The Torah, The Prophets, and The Writings. I believe Christian Bibles contain 39 books in the OT.
The Catholic Bible contains the Apocrypha and a few other changes.
The Protestant Bible used to contain the Apocrypha but it is now deleted.
The history of how the canon was determined is quite interesting reading. Some say the process was inspired just as the writings were. What I have read makes it seem more like a political fight.
And then you get into which of the ancient texts are you going to use in your translation.
All in all there are many differences. Do they make a difference? Depends on who you ask.
Do you really not know this or are you just playing Devil’s Advocate again?
I’m sorry Wookin, but that is simply not true.
I’ve said to you several times already that the age of the earth, and who or what did or did not evolve from what, are determined by measuring things. Measurement has nothing whatsoever to do with a “worldview devoid of God,” and it is the exact polar opposite of guessing.
Look, Wookin, I don’t know if I’ve explained this to you, but as far as I’m concerned, neither the age of the earth nor evolution are what concerns me. What causes me grief is seeing well-intentioned but badly informed brothers and sisters in Christ bringing God’s Word into disrepute by attempting to defend it with demonstrably untrue claims that do nothing whatsoever other than to showcase complete ignorance and in some cases even intellectual dishonesty. And on top of that, if they then start accusing anyone who rejects their demonstrable falsehoods of “compromise” or “rejecting the Bible” or “speaking with the voice of the serpent” or whatever, I’m sorry, but that is neither Biblical Christianity nor honest science. It is a cult.
Basically, as I’ve repeatedly said, if you’re going to try tackling creation and evolution, you need to make sure that you know what you are talking about and that your facts are straight. You may think that rejecting evolution is faith, but misrepresenting it – for example, by claiming that it is involves making assumptions or presuppositions that it does not – is lying. By continuing to insist that it’s all about “secular science” and “presupposition” and “a best guess,” when I and others have explained to you that it’s far, far more rigorous than that, you are just proving to everyone around that not only do you not have the faintest idea what evolutionary scientists and geochronologists actually do, but you have no desire whatsoever to learn either.
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Protestant, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Russian Orthodox churches have different Old Testament canons of Scripture. Seriously, you didn’t know?
The Puritans got rid of the Apocryphal books, but not for everybody. Anglicans and Episcopalians still use the Apocryphal books; but not for doctrine. They are included in the New Revised Standard Bible.
My point was simply that the Bible changes. I did see where the 1611 Authorized version is still available for those inclined to go that route.
Without Christ, we wouldn’t have scripture based off of Christ.
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That makes me wonder. Before the Bible was mass produced by printing presses, did the early Christian teachers typically pass down Bible stories through oral traditions?
Well, the printing press was invented in the fifteenth century. That’s why religious artwork and catechisms were more important. It wasn’t purely oral tradition, because some clergy were literate and knew what the text said. But translating the Bible into vernacular languages was not a thing the church did until the Reformation.
John Walton and Brent Sandy explore a lot of the orality issues in The Lost World of Scripture.
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I think that what Wookin Panub is asking is to consider (1) what has been passed down to us that makes up all of the OT and NT ‘Bible’; (2) if we had none of that, and (3) instead had only some vague story by seemingly nobody, with no people, no Abraham, and no Genesis 1 however interpreted. Either that ‘Bible’ is worth every word, or it is all just up for grabs. Either (A) it is all accurate, and humanly normal, record, or (B) it is all suspect.
And if (B) is our option, then on what basis do we claim to know the truth of Jesus?
Of course, we can reject (B), and claim (A), by way of denying a universally normal way of record and cosmological concern. But that would only reduce the ‘Bible’ to little more than (x) a product of some odd culture that, for some odd reason, had no normal cosmological concern (John Walton style), or (y) a mess of nonsense that somehow includes what we deem to be the uniquely salvific message.
But if we assent to this last bit ((y)), then on what basis are we confident that that unique message either constitutes or includes a uniquely crucial reality which is not afforded by any non-Christian belief system?
But (2/3) is not an option, it’s a hypothetical that isn’t reality, so literally, a non-option. We do have what has been passed down to us. So how do we base “option B” on something that isn’t real (2/3)? That makes absolutely no sense.
But why does it have to be a literal account in order to tell us why humans sin? It would seem to me that Genesis works just fine as an allegory of how humans came to know good and evil.
Can you give me an example of one of these illusions?
If a literal interpretation of the Bible were so trustworthy you wouldn’t have to ignore facts by calling them illusions.
You made yourself the standard of God’s word when you insisted that it requires a literal interpretation.
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This also makes me reflect on the long standing tradition within the Roman Catholic Church where the priests are the caretakers of the written text and they communicate what the text says to the congregation. If memory serves, at one point in history people were actually arrested if they were found in possession of a Bible, especially during the rise of the Protestant Reformation which argued that people should have direct access to the text. It could be that this RCC tradition is a carry over from the early Christian churches where the leaders of the church were responsible for memorizing or keeping the texts.
I’m thinking not of reality, but of epistemic justification. One can be right, but for some profoundly wrong reasons. And that is not an inert substance, as it were.
Okay.
