Great questions and I have been exploring issues relating to this so it has been interesting to read people’s comments. I haven’t read The Source but now that you’ve referred to it, I wouldn’t mind reading it sometime.
We use language to express ourselves and God reveals himself in ways that we understand whether it is through the language we speak, the world around us, other people and of course, the Bible. Jesus being the ultimate expression of God revealing himself to humanity. God didn’t speak to Abraham in the same way he spoke to Moses or to the gathering of the disciples at Pentecost or to us today. Each follower of ‘el shaddai’ (almighty god) has responded to his revelation, and his ‘voice’ is heard in different ways according to our needs even at different times of our lives as well as through the millennia.
Why should God only ‘start’ by revealing himself to Abraham? Is it too much to say that God has always been revealing himself to humanity as we have evolved and that throughout history (including pre-history) there have always been some who have responded but others haven’t? Consider that Abraham’s siblings probably also knew ‘el’ (god) as Yahweh, as his nephew Betheul praised Yahweh when Abraham’s servant asked for Rebekah as a wife for Isaac (Gen 24:31). Genesis also records others worshiping Yahweh:
Enosh or people ‘At that time he (or they) began to call on the name of Yahweh.’ (Gen 4:26)
Enoch walked with ‘elohim’ (God) (Gen 5:24)
Lamach and of course Noah
The issue for many is where Adam and Eve come in to the story of evolution. Were they real individuals or representatives of humanity? The way I look at it as that the Bible is primarily a theological book not a manual or a history lesson. I believe that the writers were inspired and guided by God but I don’t believe that Genesis 1-3 were intended to be understood as history. The story teller was teaching his/her audience what type of God they believed in and why there was suffering, etc. This was against a backdrop of polytheism/animism where the whole of nature (sun, moon, animals, etc) was believed to be inhabited by gods or spirits. The story teller believed in one creator God who made everything and that we were designed to have a relationship with him but we rejected his love.
Or, the so-called Apocryphal books were also inspired, and Christendom has been continuously guided by the HS ever since, such that Inspiration never ever ceased?
Constantine and the Council of “Victory” he called at Nicea = Revelation 19?
M Welcome to the forum, Philip @phildub. Thanks for those observations. Interesting as to how Yahweh was worshipped in the midst of polytheism. Rachel stole Laban’s household gods to take off with Jacob, with no hint of condemnation in the text.
It appears that polytheism was not a problem until the law was given to Moses, even though early Genesis reinforces only one God as creator of all. I suppose that is consistent with the thought that early Genesis is a much later writing, and ties in with Paul’s writing in Romans that “where there is no law ,there is no transgression.”
It seems the writers who compiled those scriptures were well aware that Judaism arose from a culture of polytheism, and saw no problem with presenting it as such.
I have a question. Since mans fall from the Garden didnt they knew there was one God? So is the worshiping many Gods a part of the human nature after the fall?
I see three possible answers (possibly among many more)…
Monotheistic cultures (after Adam and Eve if you like) with different languages and traditions (after Babel if you like) came together and preserved their own names and traditions creating a society with more than one god.
Some cultures believe in animating spirits which they see in just about everything and when they came into contact with monotheistic cultures their word for spirit became translated as gods. Thus they were thought of as polytheistic when perhaps that was not completely accurate.
As this thread suggests, perhaps there was a development of all kinds of abstract, mythical, and supernatural thinking before God communicated with Adam and Eve and thus monotheism has spread among a species which already had many different religious and supernatural ways of thinking.
Jesus said “My Kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). He did not ask the Father to send the spirt of truth, the comforter nor the teacher to build physical walls and elevate kings, bishops and popes to positions of power. This is all the work of the usurper, It started with Constantine and continues today…
Please be aware of what you are claiming – Constantine defeated Diocletian, legalized Christianity, founded Constantinople & the 1000-year long Christian Byzantine empire (fact, yes?)…
and convened the Council of “Victory” at “Victory-town” (Nicea = Nike = Victory)
You are asserting that that Rev 19 “Victory” of Christ never occurred
Dear Erik,
I am saying that Rev 19 is the description of a battle in Heaven and has nothing to do with the Byzantine empire. I do not deny that it occurred, just that it occurred long ago, during the Fall.
And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean. (Rev 19:14)
There were no armies of Heaven fighting for the Roman Empire as it expanded its rule over humanity. You placed the word “Christian” in front of the Byzantine empire, but it was not Christ-like, far from it.
Historically, religion existed prior to the invention of writing and it continued/continues to exist in cultures without written languages. The world’s first temples predate the world’s first written texts.
If you can use an intolerably late response, here I am! Excellent summary of the alternatives in your earlier post. I’d like to take them in reverse order:
God did reveal God-self to a literal representative Adam and Eve who then carried that faith out into the wide world after the fall, but who found some forms of other religions already developed. These other forms of religion remained predominant while the faith that Adam and Eve brought was sometimes a very thin thread, but always a “remnant”. These other religions may have also been willful walking away from the God they knew, and/or demonic influence partnering with people who didn’t want to know the one true God.
The problem with the “thin line” of YHWH worship stretching from Adam and Eve to Abraham and Israel is that the Bible itself disputes that thought.
Josh. 24:2, Joshua said to all the people, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Long ago your ancestors, including Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates River and worshiped other gods.
Ezek. 16:3, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says to Jerusalem: Your ancestry and birth were in the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite.
Ezek. 16:8, Later I passed by, and when I looked at you and saw that you were old enough for love, I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your naked body. I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign Lord, and you became mine.
Regardless of one’s beliefs about a literal Adam and Eve, the “thin line” was broken somewhere along the way, since Genesis, Joshua, and Ezekiel agree that YHWH called Abram/Israel out of paganism and idolatry. Clearly, there was a beginning to the Lord’s revelation to Israel, so the fact that other forms of religion predate the historical origins of YHWH worship shouldn’t present a problem for Judaism or Christianity.
I have to dismiss your second scenario (the social scientists have it wrong). There actually is quite a bit of evidence for a nascent spirituality that developed over time into spiritism, animism, and idolatry. Here’s a good video on that subject: The Roots of Religion: Genevieve von Petzinger (~20 min.).
Now, if you’re willing to exchange a “special relationship with YHWH” for a “universal knowledge of the divine,” then Rom. 1:18-25 is a fairly good sketch of those events. In his commentary, J.D.G. Dunn notes the “obviously deliberate echo of the Adam narratives” in Paul’s sequence of events and says that “it was Adam who above all perverted his knowledge of God and sought to escape the status of creature, but who believed a lie and became a fool and thus set the pattern (Adam = man) for a humanity which worshipped the idol rather than the Creator.” As Morna Hooker observed in her 1959 essay on Romans 1, it’s from “this confusion between God and the things which he has made that idolatry springs.”
Dear Jay,
Thank you for pointing out my imprecise wording. I should have said “a social construct based on inspired words.” The first religions were based on the Words of the various prophets, or directly from God.
Best Regards, Shawn
The question of the origins of religion is a little like that of creation. In both cases we see prototypical, most would say more primitive forms which presage Christianity. Before monotheistic religions such as Christianity there are polytheistic religions and before those animism and shamanism. Before astrophysics, evolution and research into the chemical processes leading up to life we had naive intuitive theories of an earth centric universe, spontaneous generation and creation stories. If you look at the origins of religion dispassionately, you might imagine that the forms it has taken reflect competing formulations for self understanding and community building, functions which likely conferred evolutionary advantages on human cultures. Rather than ask which formulation is true it might be better to ask which has most succeeded in bringing a stable culture and best knit the lives of its adherents together for the general good.
The origins of religion predate the origins of city-states, let alone empires. Religion did not begin with Constantine. The Bible is filled with many issues, but we were attempting to discuss a particular one that has nothing to do with your interpretation of history.
Nickolas…That is a good question, with many possible answers. Maybe after the fall, subsequent generations forgot the “one God” idea?? It does not take long for people to forget things.
The bent toward polytheism may be because we could not conceive of a single Being who could be over all…or that we wanted a deity that we could see (in statues)…not to mention a deity who could be controlled ( i.e., make the right offerings and rain will come).
We were (and are) made to worship. But once we set off on our own course, any sort of notions of God (since we cannot know Him beyond what He reveals and we had obviously turned our backs on that) became possible.