This is a helpful acknowledgement. I don’t know if you speak for many or few on this board with respect to this one point, but it is still good to see any acknowledgement that the original audience would have understood Ex 20:8-11 and Ex 31:12-17 as reminding them that the Lord created the universe in six days. In other words, at least you and I are agreed (or at least very close to agreement) on this culturally-sensitive reading of these two texts.
Of course, it’s a whole other issue to decide whether He did actually do so in six days, but if we can agree that Moses and the Israelites saw things that way, we’ve accomplished something.
George, I can understand why you might think I am all these things, but I have re-read that sentence several times and I cannot for the life of me figure out why you would describe it that way.
Regardless of your reasons, if you really think the sentence in question is that off the wall, I don’t understand why you would waste precious time interacting with me on this board.
I don’t know what they thought, or what cultural assumptions they did or didn’t have that we don’t, but the word yom can mean that, and in fact does elsewhere in Scripture.
Amen. A funny thing about Hebrew poetry – most of the “rhymes” are conceptual, which is to say they do not rely on sound association but on the thought. For example, Psalm 2 begins:
Why do the nations rebel?
Why are the countries devising plots that will fail?
The kings of the earth form a united front;
the rulers collaborate against the Lord and his anointed king.
Notice that the second line repeats the idea of the first, and the fourth repeats the third. (There are many more possible arrangements, of course, but this is the simplest.) This type of poetry can be translated into virtually any language without losing any of its structure or force.
In contrast, Islam considers every translation of the Quran as merely an interpretation.
Speaking for myself, I’m happy to. (@r_speir and I do not know each other, and this is the first time I recall bumping into him in this forum.)
I think @r_speir put the matter very well when he said:
That is, Jesus spoke about historical events in the Old Testament in the same way whether the event was earlier in OT times (i.e., those which are questioned more such as in Gen 1-11) or late (i.e., those which occur after the time of David and Solomon and whose historicity are less controversial). In other words, I see no indication that Jesus regarded any of the early events as “true myth,” as some have called them.
When you phrase it that way, I’m not sure I do either. However, His remarks in Matt 19 and Mark 10 about marriage indicate, at least to me, that He saw Adam, Eve, and marriage as all occurring “in the beginning.” That fits better with a six-day creation than with any OEC view I’m aware of.
I fully concur with you that Jesus lived His life on earth as a genuine human being, which includes - among other things - not being omniscient.
The question this raises is, of course, would Jesus have spoken differently about the history of Genesis in a scientific age than He did in a pre-scientific age. I think that’s a legitimate question to ask. (And, of course, there are other ways to ask it.) But it must be asked and answered adequately. I feel no liberty at all to conclude without deliberation that because He lived in a pre-scientific age His regard for the historicity of events described in the Old Testament can for this reason alone be ignored.
If you want me to disregard Jesus’ view of the historicity OT events, help me with this understanding in mind.
It’s fair for you to give me this warning. But I hope you also recognize that it’s fair for me to say that I am intensely focused on getting the foundation of the building right - not trying to complete the entire structure in that time. In any case, the key factor is not time, but conscience. As long as it takes to get conscience clear is as long as we should take to act. The longest journey begins with a single step and the single step should be taken as soon as a person’s conscience gives clarity to it - even if he can’t see the rest of the way that clearly. I am estimating how long it will take me to have a clear conscience on this subject, but if it ends up taking me longer than that, then I’ll take that long before taking the first step.
I have learned that a clear conscience does not guarantee that I will be right about any issue of life, but failing to follow conscience is always a mistake.
I have so appreciated this truth over the years. I wish more people appreciated it. I am so glad you took the time to emphasize it. Robert Alter was my introduction to it. IT IS A BEAUTIFUL THING!
Though Moses and the Israelites could consider “yom” as “eon” when appropriate just as easily as we can, I think only a culturally-insensitive interpretation would say that Moses and the Israelites understood “yom” as “eon” in Ex 20:8-11 and Ex 31:12-17.
Not even when 2 Peter 3:8 and Psalm 90:4 explicitly acknowledge the possibility?
Way too tenuous. He only mentions “in the beginning” in passing, in a verse that’s about something completely different. Nowhere near enough to create a non-negotiable doctrine out of it.
This one reminds me of these arguments that people use to try and calculate the date of the Rapture. They’ll take one verse, insist that it can only refer to the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, then they’ll take another verse somewhere else, insist that it can only mean 40 years, then they’ll take a third verse somewhere completely different, and insist that it means the Rapture must be on such-and-such a particular day.
That kind of thinking gave us 88 Reasons why the Rapture will be in 1988. Then 1989, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2001, 6/6/2006, Harold Camping in 2011 (twice), the Mayan non-apocalypse in 2012, and more recently Four Blood Moons.
The “caveat” regarding how the text was intended almost always shifts to God himself. When I hear Evolution supporters attempting to couch the nature of the text for humanity in all ages … it is done from the possible perspective of God’s views … not usually from the perspective of the humans.
For example, Job seems quite clearly to be describing actual storehouses of snow and hail … because that’s what the writer thought was responsible. God, however, to the extent he is responsible for putting actual words into the mind of the writer, might have thought this was “close enough” for a pre-scientific society.
In the New Testament, Jesus is described as becoming more wise over the years. This is not what one would want from one’s God, but I think there is ample evidence that while God was enrobed in the flawed body of human flesh, he did not have the normal range of omniscience that most people would attribute to the Divine.
So, in other words, just because Jesus is God doesn’t mean you would hand him the keys to your stick-shift Ferrari !!!
Though, it would seem likely that if drove it into a ditch, he could get it out on his own, and fix the fender soon enough after.
[quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:320, topic:36256”]
I am trying in this discussion to be sensitive to the sensitivities of all participants - including you. However, I seem to offend your sensibilities about science quite frequently, and your view is either too sophisticated or too idiosyncratic for me to fully discern.[/quote]
Mike, this is not about my tender sensibilities.
It’s about your polemic framing of the dilemma.
For example, your accusation against Jonathan: “You [Jonathan] seem to believe that the earth is old, and you seem to believe it because scientists say so.”
You offered no evidence to support your claim, nothing I’ve seen of Jonathan’s writing here suggests that he believes scientific conclusions (false framing of science as religious belief), and there’s nothing to suggest that he seems to do so on the basis of mere hearsay.
It took 3 back-and-forths between you and Jonathan to get you to drop the absurd claim, but you didn’t even retract it.
How about a simple acknowledgment that science is not hearsay, that it is not simply retrospective inference, and that it involves prediction of things we don’t know?
And how about playing a game of Clue with your kids, thinking about how you’re learning about something that God created (the random shuffle) using scientific hypothesis testing that includes mostly false hypotheses?
[quote]I’ll continue to do the best I can, but it would help if you’d give me a little latitude on the vocabulary.
[/quote]This isn’t about vocabulary. It’s entirely conceptual.
The point of “cultural sensitivity” is to understand the limitations of the writers and audience of that day … rather than to not to put cuffs on our wrists out of some sense that what they thought is what we have to think.
Cultures can be in error. George Washington was a slave owner. But because he was not alive at the time of the Civil War, he and the other founders with slaves get more of a “pass” or “tolerance” for their flawed views.
Latter-day generations, on the brink of the emancipation of American slaves get less compassion, because the time had come to shift world views.
Similarly, acknowledging that Moses (or his successors) thought the firmament was firm or that snow gets stored for the big battle is not equal to concluding we must believe the same thing.
Cultural sensitivity runs in the other direction! We don’t think Moses was an idiot… because he was a man of his times.
But if modern audiences encounter “old school” types who think slavery was a necessary evil… or that the sun really does go around the Earth, that would be borderline contemptible, would it not?
As discussed before, your scenario of creating the Earth with age already embedded in it runs into some serious problems. One problem is that it requires God to create the Earth with fossils already in the ground. It requires God to go out of his way to fake a history that never happened which doesn’t make any sense to me. Using the “water to wine” example, it would be like Jesus creating bottles of Chateau Lafite 1865, complete with the correct labels, cork, and bottle, not to mention chemically indistinguishable from Chateau Lafite 1865. Why would Jesus go to all the effort to fake a bottle of Chateau Lafite? Why not just make some good wine?
What I said is that the YEC view that I have seen on AIG and ICR, and which I believe you have supported, is that subsequent to the six days of creation week, nature manifests an orderliness that can be scientifically investigated and described. Moreover, this order permits a reconstruction of the date of events since that creation week, such as the supernova that led to Crab Nebula.
Let me stop here and ask: have I fairly characterized your view?
Assuming yes, allow me to proceed. Imagine a large pile of millions of artifacts from all the archeology museums and labs in the world. They all have tags with dates like 800 CE, 100 CE, and 1200 BCE. None in this pile have a tag than reads older than about 2000 BCE. There is a sign in front of the pile that says:
“The tags are based on laboratory analysis of the ratio of carbon isotopes. This analysis assumes a constant and well-known rate of radioactive decay.”
Based on our previous conversation, I think you would agree that basically all the tags are correct, subject to normal error rates. Would you agree?
Now imagine another pile of artifacts, not quite as large but still containing hundreds of thousands of artifacts.However, all of the tags have dates like 7200 BCE, 9800 BCE, 19000 BCE, and 36000 BCE. None of them have a date later than 6500 BCE. And it has the same sign standing in front of it, telling you that the dates on the tag are derived from the ratio of carbon isotopes.
Now you notice another sign standing in front of this pile. It states:
“Ancient peoples could not tell their history to us directly because they had not yet invented writing. However, we can learn their history through these artifacts. These artifacts tell us that the Magdalenian hunter-gatherers arrived in western Europe beginning in about 15,000 BCE. Over the millenia they developed fine stone tools (microliths). By the end of their civilization, in about 10,000 BCE, they had learned to craft harpoons and arrowheads from bone. They had an elaborate culture, demonstrated by their cave art and adornments such as necklaces. The artifacts also show that they spread into Switzerland, Belgium, and southern Germany in about 10,000 BCE. This coincides with the climate and geological data that indicate that the Ice Age was ending at the same time, making such a geographic spread possible.”
“But the artifacts in this pile before you tell us many, many other histories. The artifacts tell us the history of the Azilian who succeeded the Magdalenians, and of Maglemosians who succeeded the Azilians. The artifacts tell us the history of the Clovis who spread southward along the west coast of the Americas over a period of thousands of years as the Ice Age ended, simultaneous to rise of the Azilians. They tell us that the Clovis spread and diversified into many sub-cultures over a period of about 13,000 years, and these sub-cultures eventually gave rise to the native American tribes that Europeans first encountered about 500 years ago.”
“The artifacts tell us the history of many, many other civilizations that arose, thrived, and eventually declined throughout the period we call prehistory. Unfortunately, this sign cannot tell all the stories. Look at how fine the print already is on this sign! We urge you to explore the artifacts alongside the thousands of archeologists who have devoted their lives and scholarship to the history of ancient peoples who lived tens and even hundreds of thousands of years ago.”
I don’t want to make assumptions about your view, so let me ask you: what do you think of the historical accounts that the artifacts and tags tell us, Mike?
Jesus gives a functional ontology of God’s creation of man and woman: God created the two to become one. Such a functional ontology tells us how we should live in relationship to God and one another (“What God has joined let no man separate”). I affirm Jesus’ teaching, and have been living according to it every day of the past 33+ years of my wedded bliss with my wife Linda.
What I do not see at all in Jesus’ teaching is any sense that it mandates a literalistic, the-universe-came-into-being-in-exactly-six-24-hour-days interpretation of Genesis. The full extent of the history in Jesus teaching about Genesis 1-3 is this: God did it with a purpose. And I fully affirm that, as do you.
There is no Everest there, Mike. I don’t even see a small hill. There are many questions and difficulties involved in Jesus’ citations of the tanakh, but a supposed 6-day-literalistic-creationism is not one of them.
If you want Mt. Everest to appear before my eyes, Mike, I would request that you provide an exegesis of Matthew 19 that shows that Jesus was unambiguously instructing his followers to approach Genesis 1-3 with a literalistic hermeneutic. Your exegesis should specifically rule out the possibility of a functional interpretation --i.e., I should at the end of your exegesis see how it is that “God created man and woman for a specific purpose” just doesn’t cut it.
If you don’t want to do this, I do not hold it against you. We’re still brothers in Christ.
Much appreciated!
This is because you are being inconsistent in your hermeneutical approach to the Scriptures. However, you don’t even realize the inconsistency because you haven’t taken off your modern, Western eyeglasses when you read the Scriptures that Cardinal Bellamine quoted. If you could take those eyeglasses off for a moment, you would see that Bellarmine was making the ineluctable conclusion of geocentrism that flows from a desire to honor the Scriptures through a literalistic hermeneutic.
And you also need a way to know when to let of, and when to cling to, scientific facts presented in the Bible. Among these facts is geocentrism.
I think you will understand why I do not find it convincing if you just say that you “don’t feel like” the Bible is driving you toward geocentrism. Your feelings could have all sorts of origins, and much of your feelings flow from the worldview eyeglasses that you wear without even realizing it.
You show no evidence of taking seriously the historical fact that Bellarmine held geocentrism and supported it from the Scriptures, For that matter, you show no evidence of taking seriously the millions of Jews and Christians who for millenia, up to the time of Kepler and Galileo, saw in the Scriptures incontrovertible support for geocentrism.
I am weighing two things in a balance. On the one side is Mike Gantt’s feelings, and on the other side are multiple millenia of faithful exegetes–all the leading scholars of the Church prior to Kepler and Galileo–who saw incontrovertible support in the Holy Scriptures for geocentrism.
The reason that this analysis is important, Mike, is that you are claiming, as best I can discern, that a literalistic hermeneutic yields historical conclusions but does not yield scientific conclusions–Bellarmine and millenia of unanimous testimony from leading Christian scholars notwithstanding. Therefore, you consider yourself free to accept heliocentrism even while you feel bound to reject much of astronomical, geological, and archeological history.
If you want the scale to come down on the side of your feelings, Mike, you have a lot of work to do. You haven’t even begun to show a justification for disregarding the scientific content in the geocentric Scriptures.
If you don’t want to do the work, that is OK. We’re still brothers in Christ, and other concerns might take precedence.
As I said, Moses and the Israelites could interpret “yom” as “eon” when appropriate just as well as we can. The problem is that it’s not appropriate to do so in Ex 20:8-11 and Ex 31:12-17 because the internal logic of those passages depends on “6 yoms” being “6 regular days.” [quote=“jammycakes, post:331, topic:36256”]
Way too tenuous. He only mentions “in the beginning” in passing, in a verse that’s about something completely different. Nowhere near enough to create a non-negotiable doctrine out of it.
[/quote]
I don’t think you’re appreciating the nature and force of Jesus’ argument against the Pharisees. They were invoking a commandment of Moses in defense of divorce and Jesus’ appeal to higher authority was to the original creation order established by God. It was a stunning argument, saying that marriage was an inherent aspect of nature itself and could not be violated or changed. Moses’ “certificate of divorce” was thus a temporary concession to humanity’s fallen nature. Jesus’ argument falls apart if He was not describing the way things actually were in the beginning - that is, according to Gen 1-2, which He was quoting.
Jesus was not just mentioning “in the beginning” in passing - it was the essence of His argument. For you to compare this to the many foolish predictions about a rapture is unwarranted…to say the very least.
I myself am a person who believes scientific conclusions, and who does so proudly, so I would hardly “accuse” someone else of doing the same. I just struggle with some of their historical conclusions - specifically, ones that conflicts with what I understand the Bible to be saying.
