When Does the Bible start being translated literally?

In response to Christy who finds my assumptions regarding Satan’s ability to “make” disturbing I must note that I am unaware of any statements in the scriptures themselves which specify that they might not “disturb” certain schools of thought.

God did not “come along much later” to create true reasoning humans. He merely allowed Satan a sufficient number of “do-overs” to establish the fact that he was a hopelessly inept maker who deserved to be exposed and disgraced to the angelic contingent in general as the incompetent that he truly was. Even when in possession
of God’s very “blueprints”, he could not properly execute them. Of course only The
Word of God could.

The Genesis account itself tells of the earth being formless and void before God pronounced “Let there be light”. Notice that it is nowhere specified that this was the
first instance of light being permitted to shine upon the earth… only that for some unspecified period of time before that instant, darkness had been the condition. This corresponds very well with the scenario posited by science that a mass extinction event caused by meteor impact or volcanism caused a great cloud of dust or smoke to circle the earth for a period of time before it cleared, allowing light to once again reach the surface. The sun, moon, and all other celestial bodies had already been created some
billions of years prior to that and were as luminous as they are today… Young Earth creationists would have us believe that they were created AFTER God proclaimed: “Let there be light!”

Now whose take on matters seems hopelessly chronologically confused?

In English “create” and “make” are synonyms, so I’m having a hard time seeing how changing the verb fixes the theological problem. What is the distinction in your mind? It is disturbing because the contention that Satan makes anything directly contradicts Scripture and the Nicene Creed. (John 1:3, Col 1:16, Rom 11:36)

Where do you get your premise that all hominids were defectively made humans? Is a dolphin defective because, even though it is intelligent and capable of some pretty amazing things, it isn’t a human?

Who made passenger pigeons, God or Satan? Things don’t necessarily go extinct because they are inherently defective. It happens when species cannot adapt quickly enough to (often catastrophic) changes in their environment.

You have got some pretty imaginative mythology out of one puzzling verse in Genesis? Did you come up with this all by yourself or is their a website or book that explained these theories to you?

I attempt to understand the Scriptures in terms of the meanings the writers (and
the Holy Spirit which inspired them) intended when they were written. There are two different Hebrew words used, and they are by no means synonyms. They understood “making” to mean changing the form and/or molecular combination of existing matter to bring something not previously realized into existence whereas “creating” meant the bringing forth of matter itself into existence. Satan is incapable of creating, but before being restrained (as explained in 1 Peter), had some limited ability to “make”.

The text in Colossians correctly explains that everything we can NOW observe is in fact the creation of Christ. It does not speak to the possibility that Satan was at one time able to “make” before he abused that power and it was taken away. I believe in not only a “Christian” and “Abrahamic” dispensation, but also a strongly implied “pre-human” dispensation. Since humans were not around to be convinced by reason, who was? The angels of course. Satan never had the power to convert energy into matter as Christ obviously did, but at one time he was apparently able to re-order existing matter as he liked, and tried to make viable life forms, but kept on getting it wrong. The only other explanation is that God was forced by some unknowable inability (which it is ridiculous on the face of the matter to assume He would be limited by) to rely on random accidents to correct what He by all appearances was unbelievably unable to figure out how to do properly in the first place.
If Satan was restrained from the very first instant that he rebelled, how did evil enter in to do the wreckage it so obviously has? Why does the Book of Job (Chapter 1) have Satan walking right into a meeting between God and the angels and complaining right to the face of God that he was “being treated unfairly in not being permitted to afflict Job” as he would have preferred to? Was this just another fable to be spitirualized away out of any literal importance?

Isaiah also explains how it is “by the abundance of power and might that He (God) has brought all the stars forth.” This is of course a simplified qualitative statement of what we would recognize as “the equivalence of energy and matter” - otherwise known is the Theory of General Relativity.

Passenger pigeons brings up the subject of birds in general. When Darwin was studying his isolated population of finches, he saw quite a variety of rather different looking specimens and was sure that he was dealing with several different divergent but “closely related” species. When he finally got back to England he asked a noted ornithologist for his opinion and was quite surprised to be informed that what he was really seeing were actually just differing “phenotypical expressions” of one readily identifiable species. He chose to disregard this specialized expert’s opinion and instead dishonestly insist that he had discovered “evolutionary change at work”. What was his motivation? I can’t know for sure, but I know that his wife was a Unitarian Universalist whose very creed explicitly denies the place of Christ as the Creator, and that’s a good enough starting assumption to run with.

Let’s apply some of the typical “Darwinian Proofs” to simple common sense tests.
The occurrence of a seeming population shift in the color of otherwise identical moths during the industrial revolution in England is pointed to as a prime example of “mutational change from one species into a different one”, as is the change in population ratio between short and long-billed finches on the Galapagos Islands.
If we apply that to the human population which features some people with larger lips and darker pigmentation but others who are pale by comparison and as a general rule have smaller mouth parts, which one shows evidence of gradually but inexhorably changing into some “non-human” type?

Dolphins are obviously not defective because they belong to the current bio-system which was cleansed of “defective” types by a series of global extinction events which even atheists now admit occurred.

My “mythology” is hardly “imaginative” compared with what Darwinism proposes. It is rather the distillation of many hundreds of passages in scripture which would require completely non-sensical explanations if left to Darwinian theory to make any sense of.

If however the strategy is to spiritualize away anything which does not satisfy academic hubris, all bets at having scripture represent anything of any real importance are off and we can accept a “theology” which defines the Creator out of any real direct role or importance at all.

If scripture was not intended to teach scientific principles, why would Isaiah have asked the question? “Can you loosen the belt of Orion?” In fact it is just relatively recently that astronomers have been able to confirm “red shift” in one of the stars which comprise the “belt” of the constellation Orion. This movement does not appear to us on earth as any perceptible “lateral” motion, but rather a moving further away from us in a 180 degree direction. If we rule out an incredibly prescient lucky guess, how did this
"unscientific primitive" with no access to even a telescope, (let alone a photometric spectrum analyzer) know this to be a fact?

The Nicene Creed is also referred to as the “Athanasian Creed” and this is perhaps more revelatory of it’s true origins. It was posed in 312 A.D. as an opposing doctrine to that of Arius. The entire business was in fact decided by a humanly convened council, and quite predictably, was decided so as to conform to what Emperor Constantine preferred to teach as the “officially recognized Creed of the Holy Roman Empire”.
The Anabaptists, for just one group of “contrarians”, were having none of this.

If, as is postulated in “The Nicene Creed”, the Holy Spirit is really a "Holy Ghost"
having status as the “Third Person” of a “Co-Equal Trinity of Divinity”, and the Three
Persons mentioned in 1 John 5:7 “agree as One”, how then is it possible that the
ONLY unforegiveable sin is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The obvious reason
is that both God the Father and God the Son are personal Entities and as such have the ability to forgive wrongs against them, but the Holy Spirit, being an impersonal Entity can
not be appealed to as a Person can. Therefore, in agreement with most all unbiased scholars, the text at 1 John 5:7 (“The text of the Holy Witness Bearers”) is spurious to the true Canon of the scriptures.

It does a pretty good job illustrating what happens when you insist that every verse in the Bible that doesn’t have an explicit disclaimer be taken literally, that is for sure. You leave orthodoxy far behind.

And, who looks to Darwinian theory to make sense of the Bible? We look to the the Holy Spirit to make sense of the Bible. We look to evolutionary theory to make sense of nature.

Well, thanks for sharing. I’m bowing out of this conversation now because I think pretty much any origins theory someone could come up with is theologically preferable to yours.

“There is a way which seems right unto a man. The end thereof is destruction.”

“Who looks to Darwin to make sense of the Bible?”

Anyone who feels they have to justify why they should attempt to subjugate the Authority of the Scriptures inspired by the very Holy Spirit you cite. I am very much buoyed by the fact that you do not refer to that Entity as “The Holy Ghost” which most people who cite the Nicene Creed usually do.

Perhaps others will be more far willing to give Scriptures more credit for being the inspired expression of factual information given to man by God who is NOT the Author of confusion. Sadly, you separate the Bible from nature as if the two should be reflexively expected to be incompatible. This could only be true if the Scriptures posed to us a picture of “nature” which is totally inimical to what we can actually observe in “nature” rather than conjecture about it. I observe just the opposite. The more I consider nature as it plainly represents itself to be, the more reasons I have to recognize how the Scriptures agree with a correct read on everything I see, and how “random accident theory” - even covered by a fig leaf of “theistic evolution” is a “forced fit”, and a highly suspect one at that.

To definitively answer the very question posed in the heading of this topic, since Jesus himself referred to Enoch as “the seventh man” and was not relating any “parable” or “allegory” as He did so, if Enoch was literally the seventh in line from Adam, clearly the line of ancestry going back to Adam (not Cheetah) is likewise literally factual. Yes, “Men of Old” existed long before Adam, but they were obviously not of Divine making. Adam was, and quite tellingly, Scripture correctly explains that “God formed the man from the dust of the earth…”. In other words, He “made” the man - He did not “create” the man forth from pure energy as He did the stars and celestial bodies, nor did He “bring the man forth” from the flesh of any other material living organism. This statement in and of itself puts the lie to any Darwinian theory regarding “hominid primate” ancestry.

How can Scripture be supported as giving us accurate information if it skips by billions of years as if this entire period of time is inconsequential and irrelevant? Because it is - to gaining any understanding of what we really need to know to obey God’s commandments and be in harmony with His will for us. If we have a proper understanding of the intent of the Scriptures, this all becomes clear. They inform us that in the latter days “men will run to and fro and knowledge will be increased”, but they also warn us of wrongly motivated men who would take to “digging up trouble”. Fossils in and of themselves are not “trouble”, but wild speculations which can too easily get attached to them and cause people to take up God-denying theories certainly fall quite solidly into that category.

Very easily. The Bible is neither a science book or “a history of the universe” book. It addresses the topics God wished to address. God gave us another book, his creation, for the kinds of answers you are asking for. Why should the Bible provide redundant information for what the creation itself already tells us?

When you insert spin and disrespectful words like “putz around” and refer to “excuses for humans” before ever “getting it right”, you sound more like a politician using emotive words to “throw mud” (as the expression goes), it is extremely difficult to take your hypotheses seriously. (It is similar to the kind of tactics Ken Ham uses whenever he wants to denigrate science or belittle the views of “compromising Christians”, which is his term for Christians who dare disagree with him.)

Someone could use your same strategy and say, “Why would a creator have to putz around for six days to create a universe when a perfect deity should be able to do it in one instant.” See how it works? SPIN destroys the credibility of the spinner.

God revealed in the scriptures what he wished and our human views on what is “consequential” and what isn’t doesn’t put us in a position to judge what we think God should have done. Was Jesus amiss for healing a blind man in two steps rather than one? Will you judge him for it? Are we in a position to judge God for allowing even the first Imago Dei descendents of HAADAM to inherit from distant ancestors what we would consider genetic defects?

I only skimmed this thread but from what I read of your posts, you seem to be assessing what God should and shouldn’t do because of reasoning from a human perspective. I’d recommend reading God’s lecture to Job in the last chapters of that book.

If I want to know in detail what God did to create humans, I trust his answers that he placed in creation, include the genome mapping which tell us a lot of that history. I find the evolutionary processes God chose to use quite amazing and a tribute to God’s wisdom. The fact that the answers in creation harmonize so well with God’s answers in the Bible thrills me and I’m so thankful to have left behind my Young Earth Creationist background where I had to constantly deny reality.

That’s my one and only post on this topic. I wish you God’s blessings as you see and learn the harmony of God’s truths which he saw fit to reveal to us.

@Anthony_Tony_Ambruti

The problem with understanding everything in the Bible “literally, metaphorically, symbolically and historically… Etc.” Is that it requires a person to do extreme mental gymnastics to do so, when it seems, in practice, more helpful to just try and discern the authors intent (rather than the intent we put on it), through careful study.

Part of your theory is based off of Psalm 90:4 I presume? “A thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is passed, or as a watch in the night.” — the problem is that the verse is saying 1000 years = 24 hours OR a “watch in the night” which is 8 hours.

The verse is simply saying Gods perception of time is different than ours, not that it’s an exact equation of 1000 years = 24 hours (or 8 hours). 2 Peter 3 also: “A thousand years with The Lord is as a day and a day is as a thousand years”. But here he does something different with the passage… Here he is saying long times are short times to God, and short times are long times.

Part of your theory implies “the wobble of the earth” after Adam’s sin. But the theory of the earth being titled on it’s axis is only a very recent modern scientific discovery. How would the ancients have any hypothesis on an earth that’s titled? Or where in the text does it imply the the earth wobbled afte Adam’s sin?

-Tim

6 posts were split to a new topic: Where Does the Earth’s Tilt Come From?

@DKWhetstone

I LOVE your question!:

“I ask this question because my wife knows my scientific beliefs, and she asked me a simple that question. If you don’t think the bible is always literal, When does the Bible start being literal? I am having a lot of issues coming up with an answer.”

I would propose that different things are easier to get right than other things.

For example, the record of Kings for Israel or Judah may well be historically reliable … but not the stories ABOUT the these royal personalities. Even then, the list of kings might dead-end into the mythical. Solomon may well be fictional… in fact, the entire scenario of Judah being part of Israel may be fictional.

I would also propose that stories that include SILLY STUFF should be excluded (generally speaking) from consideration for historically reliable:

  1. Samson with the magic hair? Come on… get real.
  2. Balaam’s talking donkey? Oyyy.
  3. Moses turning a stick into a snake and EATING the snake sticks of the Pharaoh’s magicians? Please… a child’s story.

My starting point for historically reliable tends to be Ezra … when the Persianized Jews return to Jerusalem.

George Brooks

To ask “when the Bible ‘starts’ being literal” may be akin to asking at what Dewey Decimal numbers a library ‘starts’ being literal. It’s a bit of a nonsensical question because it depends on what book you are talking about, and beyond that what passage in each book you are talking about. Pete Enns writes some good stuff on this, in his book “Because the Bible Tells Me So”.

For what it’s worth if you still want to pursue the “when” question in some vague way, though, Enns says there is much archaeological evidence to back up the monarchy period of Israel (Samuel, Kings, Chronicles …) but that extra-biblical historical evidence drops off on the times prior … Judges, Joshua, Moses and the Exodus. He isn’t claiming that those things didn’t happen in some way or form, just that the corroboration from other sources drops off, perhaps for obvious reasons of temporal distance, but perhaps for other literary reasons too.

The one criteria that you probably shouldn’t appeal to (if you are a Christian anyway) is the “silly stuff” criteria – not that I can’t sympathize with your sentiment. But keep in mind that when such criteria is used, then it isn’t clear why the walls of Jericho must fall to the “silly stuff” charge (so to speak) while the resurrection of Jesus must be preserved unscathed from the same mockery. So if your reasons for accepting one and not the other are biblically founded with a sober and scholar-based appraisal of both God’s word and His works, --well and good. But if it is motivated simply by what you find credible at first thought, then there is no place for you where the Bible is clearly going to “start being”, much less stay literal.

Ahhhh… the “silly stuff” criteria!

Jonah… in a fish … for 3 days… and he lives to tell the story?

Silly stuff? Of course. But it is a parable of being in the “netherworld” for three days.

George Brooks

@Eddie

Two things:

  1. I do see a difference in the texts of the Old Testament and the New Testament. It’s probably not a logical distinction. But I do have higher standards for the Old Testament because I don’t think there’s much reason for the miraculous in the Old Testament. It is virtually devoid of discussions of a happy afterlife … or ANY valid afterlife. So without a need to “sell” an afterlife, what’s the point of all those miracle stories like Samson and his magic hair … or Jonah being 3 days INSIDE a fish.

  2. But I certainly don’t see God as suspending the laws of physics. To me, that would be the same as God being able to make a round triangle… or boiling ice… things that are contradictions.

George Brooks

@gbrooks9
@Eddie
So, to in some ways echo what Eddie says above, it sounds like you are naturalistically selective (Jeffersonian style), but only with the old testament, and then you become somewhat more sympathetic when it comes to the new because it, in your assessment, at least has the point of “selling” an afterlife. Is that a fair restatement? And if so, is the presentation of an afterlife the only valid objective the Bible is allowed to point towards?

If so, I think Eddie is correct to challenge your approach as being unduly driven by the enlightenment era. Such an approach is steeped in Scientistic thought and (whether intentionally or not) buys into their presuppositions for how theological truth should be evaluated, or dismissed rather – at least as far as the old testament goes.

It is commendable if you harbor the new testament away from this allowing that God can and does do great things. But so much of what is in the New uses and points back to the Old to establish its own validation.

@Eddie

You write:
“Nor can I think of any reason why the presence of absence of a doctrine of an afterlife in a religious text [comparing Old Testament to New Testament] should be connected with a reader’s willingness to accept its accounts of miraculous events.”

This would not be a surprise to me.

You also write: “there is no form of orthodox Christian belief, Catholic or Protestant, in which such a distinction is maintained.”

Oh, I know. That’s because I’m the first to identify the issue!

If we know anything about Egyptian culture, it had an optimistic and quasi-universal view of the Afterlife. The Greeks were inspired by Egyptian theology, which shaped the evolution of the Greek mysteries. And compared to the Assyrians and Babylonians, the Egyptians were quite fixated on the hope of the afterlife.

Why is this interesting or important? If the Hebrew had REALLY spent a few centuries in Egypt, and in view of the purported end point of the Old Testament, which is a New Testament revelation of the afterlife, the Hebrew would have undoubtedly come away with a strong interest in the afterlife as well.

But what do we actually see? The only parts of the Hebrew Bible that actually suggests an afterlife is a latter part of Isaiah (and one other text that I cannot recall at the moment).

That’s a LOT of opportunity lost for discussing the universal hope of humanity!!!

Frankly, I think this is indicative of an underlying reality: Judaism as we know it didn’t really exist until it encountered the messianic theology of Zoroastrianism in the Persian Empire. [The point I ultimately make with this observation is that the Hebrew almost certainly didn’t spend centuries in Egypt. However, I do think the Jeremiad community in Egypt did use the opportunity created by the Persian conquest of Egypt to move back to Jerusalem. But I digress.]

Eddie, you also write: “God is the author of the laws of physics…” Absolutely. But I’m talking about DEFINITIONS.
If you think you are going to get traction by saying?:smile:

“God can make a rock so big he can’t move it … and then throw it across the Universe.”

That’s just mumbo-jumbo.

George Brooks

21 posts were split to a new topic: Eddie and George argue about stuff

I’ve been nursing this same question since converting to a Christian evolutionist, and it has continued to bring the logical side of me dangerously close to disbelieving the entire Bible at times. The spiritual side then picks up and rescues me for a time, but honestly, this is a great question and I simply cannot make complete sense of, and therefore accept any answer. Theistic evolutionists all believe that God is outside of our laws, created the laws himself, which set in motion evolution. In this way He created. That is all pretty big hocus pocus stuff in my very un-educated simple non scientific mind. It makes all of the other rather “silly” miracles in the Old Testament seem rather pale in comparison.

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Oh wait, I just noticed Brad’s response. I do accept that answer!