In slightly different terms, we’ve forgotten that there is no longer a Promised Land, there is only Babylon, that every nation of the earth is the world, that part of the unholy trinity of world, flesh, and devil.
I’ve noticed that among Christians who aren’t trying to make the U.S. correspond to ancient Israel that they don’t spend the time saved by not doing that in any positive endeavor for Christ; in this the “culture wars” folks put the rest to shame.
To what we know in our hearts that we should be!
I’ve encountered lots of people who just shut down if you start talking about Creation, but when you talk about how none of us live up to our own standards, how we know we are not what we should be, that we are broken ears open up.
The foundational doctrine is the Incarnation and that Christ came to – as they used to put it – “cure souls”.
Not for the proclamation of the Gospel!
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
“It’s in the Bible, therefore it’s true” isn’t a bad way of putting things, but that doesn’t mean that there were six actual days, it means that the message of the piece of literature is true. In modern times we consider that to say something is true that means all the details are accurate scientifically, but that wasn’t part of the ancient worldview; to the ancients the details didn’t have to be accurate so long as they contributed to the truth of the piece of literature. In the case of the first Creation story it’s two different kinds of literature at once (= brilliant writer), and in neither are the details intended to be taken literally outside the account.
So we can say that the first Creation story is true without taking it literally.
That’s an interesting way to put it. Yes, there is no longer a Promised Land. I’ve gone from one denomination that popularly (not doctrinally) sees the U.S. as such, to one that sees the church as the new covenant community that replaces or supercedes Israel. I don’t grasp (or accept either view). Jesus Christ is what is promised to us and a renewed creation.
Again the wrong tools for the wrong job, the wrong job in the wrong hands. The wrong groups focusing on the wrong goals. No one wins the Culture Wars except extreme media, lawyers, advertising agencies and producers of junk mail.
“My kingdom is not of this world.”
Your exchange here gives me so much hope for Christianity. Obviously the will to power is never in the service of God.
This popped up in a seminar discussion of the term “the fulness of time”. We decided it didn’t mean that God had no choice, it meant that God had arranged the confluence of events and acted when that confluence occurred. I think the same thing applies here; the timing was perfect because it arrived on God’s schedule.
Definitely!
And to me this rings in harmony with the principle that while the scriptures are more than human literature they are never less than that.
It just struck me that the two different Creation stories in Genesis aren’t there by accident as though the writer didn’t recognize the contradictions, they’re slapped together because they answer two question that belong together: “Who is God?” and “Who are we?” Then the Fall story picks up with the question, “What the heck happened?!?!”
Hear, hear!
Which ought to be enough to tell us that we live in Babylon.
I suspect this is why a lot of Christians I’ve known love Ezra and Nehemiah: they left Babylon and went back to the promised land to built a holy community apart from all the other nations. That holy community idea is one that makes us feel safe, so it’s quite human to want to turn where we live into a copy of ancient Jerusalem. But that copy is only imagined; the Second Temple period was never safe for Israel, in fact was mostly spent under rule by some other power.
I’ve always thought Ezra especially was more than a bit if a jerk, with his purity notions and condemnation of outsiders, so I guess I’ve never really minded living in Babylon.
I’m glad @peterkp revived this discussion. I found it by accident and that got it going again for a while, and now it’s back. it has splintered and morphed a number of times but to good result.
No. The will to power is not part of the “game” for Christians. (Part of what, as little as I understand it, Nietzsche found so abhorrent about Christianity) Power isn’t. Not political or earthly power. But that’s really easy to say, living in the West, where I have it just by being here and being a middle class, white Christian. I am born to a powerful caste.
I need to read over the new developments in the thread and see what the recent topics are. I’ll try to catch up soon.
I don’t know anything about fauth, but faith without works is dead.
Nope. Not the same thing at all.
Nobody. There is NOTHING personal about it. I was not raised in any religion. There is no bad experience about it. Quite the opposite. I was raised by those criticizing religion and what I learned was that religion (Christianity in particular) had value despite those criticisms.
WRONG and NONSENSE!!! The abuses of religion and the use of it for power and gain are legion.
So why does religion (Christianity in particular) have any value then? Because it is aware of this problem and Jesus Himself speaks to this problem!
I am a part of organized religion. But it is true that I do not look to it for salvation or as an authority on God and truth. What I do not support is the battle mentality which sees Christianity in a war against the world and the church as its army. It is practical only for a spiritual purpose and so I would remove its usefulness for power in the world, because that is what makes religion dangerous.
What am I talking about? It is this idea that religion holds the keys to heaven and salvation and can tell you what you must do to get to heaven. It leads to this mentality where lying for Jesus for the sake of saving people is a good thing to do. When religion has that kind of power then Weinberg’s indictment is applicable, that “getting good people to do bad things takes religion.” Religion definitely requires a cautionary label.
Social? yes. Practical? No.
Faith without works is dead. Yes. Absolutely correct. But the point of the works is faith not practical solutions to human problems. It is quite the opposite of your implications, that the point of faith is works. That is not correct. And no I don’t mean that we do works to demonstrate our faith. That is not faith. Real faith is doing the works for their own sake – because you value what God values and you care about them. But it is not because it is all about using religion to solve practical socio-economic-political problems.
It really is about a relationship with God – it really is 100% spiritual. The first and greatest commandment is to love God. And you are quite right to say no this doesn’t mean worship services. Jesus explained how God measures our love of God in Matthew 25 – in the things we do for those in need.
But no it is not about eliminating poverty and sickness as your redirection of Christianity to practicality implies. Frankly, the idea isn’t even coherent – and so Jesus said we will always have the poor. At best, trying to eliminate poverty will only move the line – and more likely it will only make the problem worse as we see in communism.
So we do our best for those in need because we love God. But the measure of faith is NOT whether we make a significant impact on socio-economic-political problems. Practicality has NOTHING to do with it.
My focus in my last post was as much on relational issues as on the meaning of the text. Those who go back to that post will see that I agree with your interpretation of the six days. But I would still say to you what I said to Adam: it’s an interpretation. The text itself only says “day”. Both our symbolic day and Adam’s literal day are ways that we choose to read the text, and if we all recognise that then our conversations on such subjects can be more respectful.
That feels like a sweeping statement regarding both modern and ancient worldviews. I agree that interpreting an ancient text requires us to understand the ancient worldview in which it was written. But even our modern world view is broad enough to allow levels of accuracy from scientific to metaphoric in our truth telling.
An example: Suppose an official tax return reports an income of $50000. If the actual income was $51000, I’d say the return was incorrect. But if those same numbers were the actual versus reported numbers of people at a big sports event, I’d say the report was accurate; it’s close enough. It’s in the ball park. And if an article refers to a YouTuber with “thousands of followers”, we all understand that could mean pretty much anything.
Recognising that range of flexibility in our truth telling can help us with reading ancient texts as well. We should have the humility to allow each text to speak truth on its own terms. For example, it could be that the ancestral ages throughout Genesis start off more symbolic and become more historically accurate as the narrative proceeds. We mustn’t feel the pressure to say that if one number is true/mythical (whatever that means!) then we must read all the other numbers that same way.
Accuracy isn’t the issue, it’s that they had different understanding of truth claims, different ‘cosmology’, different literary types we don’t have slots for.
And what if another source stated the number as $144,000 at that sports event? especially if you knew the arena didn’t hold more than 60,000? or if it described the event as taking place at three different fields on three different levels, when you knew the stadium had just one field on just one level?
Including recognizing that just because something looks like historical narrative to us doesn’t mean it actually is.
And there’s the problem: reading those as literal days because it looks like historical narrative is incorrect for the simple reason that back then they didn’t have such a literary form. Reading it as historical narrative actually throws away the message the writer intended – or, rather, messages – plural because it’s two different kinds of literature at once and has three primary messages, all of which are missed by reading it as historical narrative.
In fact reading the days as “symbolic” is incorrect – they don’t symbolize anything. They’re not allegorical, either. They’re a literary structure with a message, elements that aren’t to be taken literally by themselves but can be treated literally in understanding the point of the story.
God doesn’t inspire writers to use literary forms that the writer doesn’t know, He allows the writer to use forms the writer knows and the audience knows. In terms of the opening of Genesis, those forms aren’t anything familiar to us, but they were familiar enough to the original audience that they would have recognized the form and thus the message. And when people try to force that ancient literature to fit a modern form it is generally dangerous to the Gospel (as evidenced by how many kids raised with the YEC idea abandon the faith in their teens).
I’ve never seen a breakdown that shows how those could be symbolic, since it would be numerological symbolism, except in a few cases. At the same time they don’t match the obvious symbology of ancient near eastern king or other ancestral texts which tend to invoke thousands of years, so I don’t really know what to make of them – a lot have 5 and/or 7 as a factor, but that doesn’t help much (though I’ve never sat down and worked out all the prime factors of each one). Recognizing that ancient near eastern genealogies often skipped ancestors who were non-entities (or embarrassing) also doesn’t help since we really don’t know anything about most of the names individuals so there’s no telling if and how any of them were famous.
Then there’s the proposal from over a century ago that most in the lists are names of tribes rather than individuals; that might have seemed clever when first though of but I have never found a reputable scholar who didn’t just dismiss the idea.
All of the individual ages (not all of the sums of pre-son and post-son ages) are multiples of 5, plus either 0, 7, or 14.
Just out of curiosity, I tried some playing around with the age numbers seeing what would happen if they had been multiplied by five (or, later on, 3) in sexagesimal, and then written as base-10 numbers, and (with a few additional rules to handle the added multiples of seven) all of them give ages for having children between 13 and 70, and ages at death between 45 and 125.
Interesting. That suggests that the factor 5 is symbolic. Most sources agree that 5 stands for God’s favor, which would make sense.
A common factor like that isn’t something we would notice because we don’t commonly associate meaning with numbers, but people in ancient times did and so at least the educated folks would likely recognize that everything had been multiplied by 5.
BTW, how did you handle this – a spreadsheet perhaps? That would allow listing all the ages, translating them quickly into sexagesimal, flipping them into base 10, etc. Oh – and why sexagesimal?
I actually did it manually in a table, rather than in a spreadsheet. As to why, that was due to the 60-10-1 sexagesimal system used in ancient Mesopotamia.
Good old paper and pencil?
That was my guess after I posted.
Ooh, this would be good on the “What did you learn in Church” thread! Great one. Thanks
Yes. I wouldn’t guarantee that it wasn’t a pen.
No Beauty We Could Desire
Yes, you are always everywhere. But I,
Hunting in such immeasurable forests,
Could never bring the noble hart to bay.
The scent was too perplexing for my hounds;
Nowhere sometimes, then again everywhere.
Other scents, too, seemed to them almost the same
Therefore I turn my back on the unapproachable
Stars and horizons and all musical sounds,
Poetry itself, and the winding stair of thought.
Leaving the forests where you are pursued in vain
–Often a mere white gleam–I turn instead
To the appointed place where you pursue.
Not in Nature, not even in Man, but in one
Particular Man, with a date, so tall, weighing
So much, talking Aramaic, having learned a trade;
Not in all food, not in all bread and wine
(Not, I mean, as my littleness requires)
But this wine, this bread…no beauty we could desire.
~C.S. Lewis, Poems, (1964)
I think I need a copy of the @mitchellmckain dictionary. The one where Practical means control, or dictate, And would therefore be a synonym for Design.
As far as I am concerned, practical just means of use in day-to-day living.
Richard
Yep that is the definition I was going by.
I am opposed to this idea that God is something you can use. And thus if a religion is about being something of use in day-to-day living then God has nothing to do with it.
But yes, it is really all about who is in control: you or God. Control is implicit in the meaning of the word “use.”
take, hold, or deploy (something) as a means of accomplishing a purpose or achieving a result; employ.
take or consume (an amount) from a limited supply.
Usefulness and control is something science is really good at, and when atheists cannot find the same kind of usefulness in religion, I think control is what they cannot find in it. The science experiment is all about controlling the system so you can predict the outcome. There isn’t much science you can do without it.
If you want to avoid the implication of control then I would suggest to say instead…
being of value in day-to-day living
But this is problematic also, for then you have the implication of immediate expediency which is often the difference between good and evil. Good is is in the long term value while the evil sacrifices the long term value for short-sighted gains.
And so Jesus speaks of this often, by pointing out that the long term value is found in the spiritual outcome rather than the physical gain.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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