Where did this come from? I don’t recall anyone here claiming that the Flood story is allegory, not reading it anywhere either.
Why this fixation with allegory? You’re about the only person here who even mentions it.
Fallacious reasoning again. The “domino theory” of scripture totally ignores how people actually write in favor of some materialistic notion that if a book contains a piece of allegory then the whole thing must be allegorical. Odd that no one suggests that if a book contains a piece of poetry then the entire thing is poetry!
Yes, it is if you know that the big reason it made it into the canon was that Christians back then read it and saw what it was talking about happening all around them (especially those inthe western end of the Roman empire).
This is definitely true.
That’s because the Holy Spirit said so. Try reading Acts 15 without your blinders on.
Only if you insist that the scriptures were written in your worldview.
Of course none of our common ancestors could fly. The order is that we have a common ancestor with flying insects before we have one with any terrestrial animals (with lungs).
We were simple eukaryotes when we diverged from plants and this was before we diverged from flying insects.
We can get technical and say that the first land animals are arthropods (with book lungs) rather than tetrapods (our common ancestor with full lungs). I guess a question we could ask is if flying insects diverged from fully terrestrial arthropods before they lived on land? In other words, flying insects were created first to fly and never needed land. They can land on the surface of a pond or on floating vegetation. Some live in a larva stage underwater and then metamoph to flying.
This article suggests that insects wings evolved from gills (which evolved before book lungs) meaning that they did not need to be first terrestrial before they could fly.
Yes! I’ve made a crack in the door. So glad to have advanced from a science fiction writer.… I dont think it ignores the plain meaning. There is depth of meaning, certainly not contrary to it.
Well, Jesus was a Jew, so it’s no surprise he kept the law. Many people think of him as “a Christian,” but he and all the disciples were Jews, and actual practicing Christianity didn’t come about for some time after the resurrection.
Just being honest, I don’t keep Jewish civil or ceremonial law, as it was my understanding that it was only the moral law was binding under the New Covenant. I saw it as Jesus being bound by all three types laws simply because he was Jewish. If you put stock in Paul’s letters, he wrote that the moral law was the binding one after the resurrection.
But there are Christians who say, “Are you a Paulian or a Christian,” as if they don’t believe Paul’s writings are as important as the words Jesus spoke. But most Christians believe Paul’s writings are inspired by the Holy Spirit and equally important. I have never found anything Paul said that contradicts Jesus’ teachings, although I feel sure one of the resident theologians here will tell me otherwise.
For me, I do believe practicing Christians are under moral law. I believe ceremonial law was specifically for Israel to differentiate itself from others, such as pagans, and civil law was a governing law for Israel. Of course Timothy says all the law is beneficial, but I don’t believe that contradicts with Paul’s writings. I believe Timothy was saying it’s not a bad thing for believers to use all of the law as a good way to structure a society.
But I’m no theologian and have yet to take my first M.Div. program classes in my return to school (had to delay starting because of health issues with both of my 90-y
Well, Anderson is very close to where I live, and I really wanted to be able to go to in-person classes. I loved the college experience, even though I haven’t been since I graduated from UNC Asheville with a mass communications degree in 1995.
I’m not doing it because I hope to get a job in ministry, and I am not interested in being ordained. I’m just very interested in learning more, and I don’t really want to do the whole thing remotely. This might sound bad — like it’s not a good, Christian thing to do — but I look forward to retuning to an academic setting and the intellectual exercises it would offer. And I can’t think of a more rewarding field to study.
We have a seminary in my area — Erskine College — but I’d have a difficult time attending an all-in-person school because I’m a news and sports reporter at a daily newspaper and have to work days (news) and nights (sports). And I couldn’t quit my job to go back to school. Financially, it’s just not possible.
Ah, an even closer connection to you than just living in the same part of the country and being familiar with the university you are planning to attend–my uncle teaches at Erskine.
Really? That’s cool. Yeah, I was on campus this past Saturday to cover commencement. They have it outdoors “under the towers.” It rained the whole time. They didn’t move it indoors, though.
exactly…and I note the difference between the two covenants that you have correctly highlighted.
In the first covenant, we find that “the finger of God” wrote his laws on two tablets of stone (10 commandments) and the people were the ones who promised to keep them “all these things we will do” (Exodus 19:8)
In the second covenant, written in Jeremiah’s time some 400 years before Christ in the time of Daniel and the captivity in Babylon, it is “God who writes His laws on our hearts and in our minds” and God makes a promise to be their God and they will be His people. It is God who makes the approach and that is the purpose of the Holy Spirit i think…the still small voice that whispers to us…the same still small voice that spoke to Elijah
1 Kings 19:12&13
After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper 13When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.
Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”
So in fact, the actual content of the two covenants is the same…its simply the method of delivery that has changed (written on our hearts and in our minds).
So when Sunday worshipping Christians claim they are not under the old covenant but under the new one…they don’t even realise that the covenants are exactly the same. We are expected to live by the 10 commandments!
Jesus half brother James even wrote “faith without works is dead”! (James 2:26)
This does not mean we are saved by works, we are told that both Noah, Abraham and Isaac were saved by their faith…
Hebrews 11:7 By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that is in keeping with faith.
Romans 4: 16 Therefore, the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham’s offspring—not only to those who are of the law but also to those who have the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all.
The point is, whilst it is true that the israelites had great trouble fulfilling their commitment to the first covenant and broke their promise, it wasn’t until the rise of the order of the Pharasees in about the second century BC that the legalistic error in law began to take hold and be used to really suppress the people. It was this interpretation that made it a burden for the people. This was where the legalism and salvation by works took hold in Judaism i think.
Sunday is the last day of the week. I go back to work on Monday… If we are still under the old covenant, then nothing has changed and Christ died in vain!
How do we change our sinful desires, get in His presence and find deliverance? We have to go to Him and ask… We have to really get to know Him and see everything He did for us. Everyone knows that He died on the cross for us, but just knowing that does not mean we know Him. So, people will say, yeah, we are now saved by grace but we still have to follow the law… If we don’t then we are backsliders and we question our salvation.
Satan uses our shame and guilt as tools to make us feel unworthy and hide from God’s presence. Try as we might, we cannot make it to heaven by our own works, but it is by grace only by believing in Jesus… by hearing about the life that He lived, the miracles, the healings, living as a servant and then laying down His life on the cross for us, He showed us His great love. We could not keep the laws of God, but Jesus fulfilled the law for us, even every commandment that He wrote on stone tablets and gave to Moses.
We put other gods before him, but God came down from heaven and lived like a servant, putting himself after all our gods.
We made idols to worship them, but all things were made by the Word, and nothing has been made without him.
We took his name in vain, but his name, Jesus, means to deliver, to rescue, and he did deliver us by his grace alone, and his grace towards us is not in vain.
We did not keep the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for us. Jesus is the Sabbath and we find our rest in Him.
We did not honor our parents, but as children of God, our Father is in Heaven, and the Holy Spirit is our Helper.
We tried to murder Him, but He laid down His own life for us.
We tried to commit adultery against Him, but He was not married.
We tried to steal from Him, but He had nothing.
We tried to bring false witness against Him, but He accepted it all as true, taking the sins of the world upon himself.
And His life cut short, a life of celibacy, a wanderer, carrying nothing, serving, suffering and dying on a cross was not anything that we coveted.
Upon hearing everything He did for us, we cannot help but to love Jesus. And in believing… if we really get to know Him, there is then no way left for us to sin against God. For we know that Jesus is God come in the flesh. We are changed… He changes our desires and we do what is pleasing to Him.
That is only because of modern translation and change…it was not how it was in Christs day or before that time.
The following are quotes from online sources such as Britannica on the subject of calendars:
Week , period of seven days, a unit of time artificially devised with no astronomical basis. The week’s origin is generally associated with the ancient Jews and the biblical account of the Creation, according to which God laboured for six days and rested on the seventh.
Anno mundi , the year dating from the year of creation in Jewishchronology, based on rabbinic calculations. Since the 9th century AD, various dates between 3762 and 3758 BC have been advanced by Jewish scholars as the time of creation, but the exact date of Oct. 7, 3761 BC, is now generally accepted in Judaism.
The Babylonians named each of the days after one of the five planetary bodies known to them (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) and after the Sun and the Moon, a custom later adopted by the Romans. For centuries the Romans used a period of eight days in civil practice, but in 321 CE Emperor Constantine(Constantine I | Biography, Accomplishments, Death, & Facts | Britannica) established the seven-day week in the Roman calendar and designatedSunday as the first day of the week. Subsequent days bore the names Moon’s-day, Mars’s-day, Mercury’s-day, Jupiter’s-day, Venus’s-day, and Saturn’s-day. Constantine, a convert to Christianity, decreed that Sunday should be a day of rest and worship.
“According to ISO 8601:2004, the Gregorian calendar consists of 52 or 53 seven-day weeks, and Monday is designated as the first day of the week . This standardization was intended to facilitate consistency in the measurement of dates and times across different countries and cultures.”
Sunday worshipping churches began because a Roman Emporer decreed that is the day of worship…it was not Christ who made that decree but a convert to Christianity who happened to also be the ruler of the most powerful kingdom in the world at the time (Rome = legs of Iron as shown in Nebuchadnezzars dream of the Statue in Daniel Chapter 2)
The biblical account is a celebration of Creation…it is not some unimportant allegorical moral lesson for us such that it can be messed around to suit ourselves and our own desires. Even from an allegorical perspective, it still doesnt make sense to stuff around with the day of worship simply because Constantine changed the designated day of worship to suit himself and his own beliefs. The guy was a pagan and even after his conversion he demonstrated a very dubious Christian lifestyle as he kept many of his original pagan institutions and habits in place!
Adventists for example are one religious group who view Constatine with skepticism…his influence is seen as a pagan corruption of the Christian religion and the beginnings of the evil of “Babylon” the apostle John speaks of in the book of Revelation.
Anyway…sorry, for some here this would appear to have gotten off topic now. For me these things are all interconnected so i don’t find anything offtopic in the arena as its all part of the epistemological dilemma of lifes existence.
You appear to be one of the few people who hasn’t ever heard TEism preach allegory. Its the fundamental reasoning as to why the writings of Moses can be ignored in modern Theistic Evolutionary religion. I cant help it if i read widely enough that i know this but you do not…given i studied a couple of philosophy of Christian education subjects as part of my teaching degree i suppose its to be expected.
It appears to me that individuals who make such claims as yours above, are so consumed with the idea “that we are putting modern spin on ancient writings” that they do not even realise that they are mirroring the very fundamental they speak out against! In this regard, clearly you are using modern rationale to attempt to discredit ancient readings and interpretations of scripture and you do this simply because naturalism apparently proves the secular fossil record timeline so therefore ancient theology and the 2000+ year old interpretations must be wrong!
I regularly post overwhelming numbers of biblical references that completely disprove your modern interpretations of scripture and yet you always ignore them and pretend that they do not exist and then continue with this fanciful line of reasoning. Its debunct St Roymond. Continuing to blindly follow this pathway is ignoring the overwhelming biblical evidence against such claims.
Just to follow up on the above with a couple of well known examples:
1.The 4th commandments says “in six days God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them” (mirroring the creation story of Genesis)
2.Christ died physically on the cross, physically rose from the dead, and physically ascended into heaven…so atonement for sin is physical too. The wages of sin is physical death too.
The apostle Peter tells us:
he received his revelations from the writings of the prophets, ministry of Christ, and direct revelation from God in heaven (that we know from numerous Old Testament examples to patriarchs, prophets, judges, and kings, would have included visions…so Peter did not need extensive language and literacy to understand them)
Noah was saved from a Global flood that destroyed the earth and all life on it
-Lot was saved from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorah
-Satan and his angels were cast down from heaven
-All prophecy is interpreted by God (not man
The real hammer blow for the theology of TEists is that they are 100% wrong in the claim " YEC’s are placing modern interpretations on the Genesis creation and flood accounts" (the writings of the apostle Peter completely debunk this ridiculous claim. Dont believe me, go and read 1st and 2nd Peter - they are both quite short so it wont take long)
Christ modeled his entire life according to the law. He is the only individual who has ever lived who lived perfectly under the law. That is the entire point of atonement for sin according to the old testament sanctuary service model.
The lamb that was offered as a sacrifice must be perfect, without blemish. This means sinnless in the antitypical model
Christ (the antitype to the Old testament sacrificial lamb) could not make atonement for sin unless he lived the law perfectly…blameless under the law!
I think its vital that individuals go back and really study the Old Testament Sanctuary Service so they really understand this better.)
Christ did not keep the law because he was a Jew, the law predates the Jews by thousands of years.
Angels cannot sin if there is no standard by which sin is judged! The institution of the law is the very mechanism by which Satan and his angels transgressed, were judged, and thrown out of heaven (2 Peter 2:4).
4For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, a putting them in chains of darkness b to be held for judgment;
sorry I’ve edited this quite a lot to try to reduce the size of the post
So, by your thinking, Christians should be following Mosaic civil, ceremonial and the ever-binding moral law? As I said, two of those three sets of laws were to help Israel distinguish itself from others, both as a group of peoples and in their worship. That’s why there were some of the strange-to-understand requirements such as not mixing certain fabric threads, for example. There was nothing inherently evil about that, but instead a way to set Israel apart from the pagans.
Just asking, but can you provide a NT teaching that shows that gentiles are required to follow civil and ceremonial laws? Because Paul clearly didn’t teach that and had lots of opportunities to do so if it were of critical importance to the gentiles. As I said, Jesus followed the whole of the law because He was a Jew. His death and resurrection would fulfill that law. As I’m sure you know, He said He didn’t come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. And he became the embodiment of that fulfillment. Jesus didn’t die on the cross as sacrifice only for Jewish people. His work at the cross makes all other sacrifices unnecessary. He is the only perfect and acceptable sacrifice under the New Covenant.
As to your other post on the Sabbath, yes, the Sabbath Day is Saturday. And you are correct that Constantine — who, despite becoming a Christian, never gave up his sun worship — was instrumental in setting Sunday (or Sun Day) as the day of worship. But Paul gathered with others to worship on Sundays well before Constantine (Acts 20:7). Also, nowhere in the NT does it require gentiles to keep the Mosaic Law regarding the Sabbath or any ceremonial law because Jesus became the sacrifice for sin, and His death and resurrection becomes our bridge to the New Covenant. Also, according to the people of Paul’s time who followed The Way (what later we’d call Christianity), Sunday was known as “the Lord’s Day” because Jesus was resurrected on a Sunday.
If we don’t believe Christ’s sacrifice changed the world and fulfilled every requirement, then I guess we won’t believe that one can have corporate worship and rest on Sundays — a day of tremendous significance since it’s the day of Jesus’ resurrection. No person nor any act could be substituted for Christ’s sacrifice at the cross (because, with Him, “It is finished.” The work was complete for then and all time).
Don’t think of it as, “They moved the Sabbath,” because that’s incorrect. The Sabbath has always been on Saturday. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know Scripture. It’s just that corporate worship in observance of Christ was set for Sundays. And God could use Constantine, irrespective of his motives for setting Sunday as the day of observance, as a vehicle for change. After all, God used plenty of sinful men as a vehicle to accomplish great things — often things that were contrary to their nature. And Jesus magnified the humility and passion of the weak and the poor, not the self-righteous and powerful.
Paul actually rebuked the Galatians for thinking God expected them to observe certain days (Galatians 4:10–11).
The practical application to all this is that you can worship God alone or corporately at any time, on any day.
I would like to understand this better. Does the temporal sense (‘when’) necessarily include the meaning ‘beginning’/‘start’, or could it just mean ‘when’? If it could be translated as ‘when’, the ‘beginning’ would be something we might understand [interpretation…] from the context.
Why would a translation ‘When God created…’ be wrong?
Edit:
English is not my first language so I think this through my native language, Finnish. In Finnish, we have the word ‘alussa’ which can mean both a shorter and longer time frame in the beginning. It could mean a temporal moment in the beginning (the point in the beginning when…), or it could mean a longer time period covering the beginning (during the beginning…). Adding to this the ‘God created’ = ‘Jumala loi’, the sentence becomes ‘Alussa Jumala loi’. That expression is close to both the ‘In the beginning God created’ and ‘[in the beginning] when God created’.
An unimportant note is that if the text does not include the word ‘God’, in Finnish it would be replaced with the word ‘hän’ (third person singular) that is ‘gender-free’ in the sense that the same word is used for both males and females (and often for pet animals, dear soft toys, etc.).
It isn’t about science at all – there are no statements in the first Creation story that have anything at all to do with science; it’s the wrong kind of literature.
Of course it does – the text says nothing about living things on the first or the second day.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
“Ceremonial” and “moral” are artificial distinctions not found in the Torah. And the only things “binding” are found in Acts 15.
Here? Not likely.
I had a professor who insisted that Paul had a different theology. But the more I read Paul’s letters, the more I saw the congruence.
And that it isn’t for Christians, who qualify as “the just”.
No, we are explicitly NOT “expected to live by the 10 commandments” – read Acts 15, and show me the Decalogue in the list of four things the Holy Spirit considered complete for Gentile believers.
As Luther would say, this is most certainly true.
False. Christians were meeting on the first day of the week – because it was Resurrection Day – even in New Testament times.
He didn’t. What false sources are you relying on?
Don’t change the subject. I asked why you have this fixation with allegory since none of the rest of us really mention it.
No, I’m letting the scriptures be what they are instead of trying to force them to fit a modern worldview as YEC does.
Stop lying. You’ve repeated this same lie so often maybe you actually believe it, but that’s no excuse.
There is no “biblical evidence” against scholarship. God has allowed people to make numerous discoveries that have allowed us to understand the scriptures better, and I refuse to ignore them.
But that’s exactly what YECists do: the major premise of YEC is that the scriptures teach modern science, the same error that people in medieval times made when they held that the scriptures taught Aristotelian science. The truth is that the scriptures don’t even talk about science, that there are hardly any statements in scripture that even touch on science.
And the idea that if the Bible is true it has to be 100% scientifically correct cannot be found in the Bible; in fact historically that idea is a recent one in history, and it comes from one place: scientific materialism.
Read them the other day in the Greek. Your claims do not stand up.
No it doesn’t. The scripture is clear that the Law was given through Moses – not before, and not in some secret deal we aren’t told about. You are superb at making things up that cannot be found in the scriptures!
Just wondering: have you figured out what he’s talking about there? It might help to know that he did not write “hell”, he wrote “Tartarus” – which is a good clue.
Actually it all was. The Old Testament writings know nothing of a division of the Law into three categories; that’s an invention of theologians too enamored with categorizing things.
Except Constantine was really involved – by his time Christians everywhere were already worshiping on Sunday.
Yes – which made it a greater day than the Sabbath: the Sabbath could never bring anyone to God’s rest, but Jesus is God’s rest; He is the substance of which the Sabbath was just a shadow.
Um, no . . . Resurrection Day is the triumphal parade (Paul even uses that comparison) after a victorious battle, which in this case was on Friday.
The temporal prefix is attached to the word “beginning”, so it would have to be “When God began creating” (English uses participles in temporal clauses).
Though I still like the giant hippo for the actual animal.
For both of these the bibliography is impressive, and the fact that the bulk of it is from the last quarter century makes me feel as though I really know nothing any more!
… I dont think it ignores the plain meaning. There is depth of meaning, certainly not contrary to it.
