This seems logical if you look at everything from a juridical point of view. If we view salvation as ever-increasing communion with God, rather than avoiding hell, then this explanation seems incomplete.
I took a course on Job when I was a Fuller student. The lesson that Job seems to finally learn is that we cannot know why or how God did everything the way he did. We have to accept our limitations, go on with life and be faithful.
“Salvation is the restoration of the wholeness of God’s image in us, of the possibility of our union with God. It is the restoration of our original essence. “Holy Tradition teaches that… we will be saved when we become like Christ… Because of our faith in Him and our desire to become God-like, we are not so much saved all at once as slowly changed into the creatures we were created to be.”
Please take a look at that article. It expresses the Eastern Orthodox teaching of salvation better than I can.
I’d also like to add that if our ideas are governed by loyalty to a particular concept of inerrancy and the conclusions that we perceive to be dictated by that conclusion, we may limit our understanding of many things, theological as well as scientific.
@Swamidass has the answer to that question! Use your ID for the BioLogos discourse system to join Dr. Swamidass’ PeacefulScience.Org discourse system.
Briefly stated, the delay between Adam (or Noah) and the birth of Jesus was required to make sure all humanity was completely included within the Ancestral tree of humanity, from the genealogical perspective of Adam/Eve.
The logic is similar (but for completely different purposes) as the Mormon church’s goal to have all of humanity “sealed” to at least one member of the Mormon Church (alive or deceased).
[Important note: But do not let this reference unintentionally create the idea that Joshua is in any way representing Mormonism or any kind of offshoot of those denominations.]
Thank you, Mr. Mohr, for this gracious reply. I agree.
However, I am not closed to the idea of Hell. I am closed simply to the idea that Salvation is in any way mainly about avoiding being sent there.
Thus, when I say that Man is on trial, I do not mean that Man is called to conceive of his life as a trial. His life is, after all, a blessing, even though he knows he shall one day die.
No healthy little child thinks life is either curse or trial, and no healthy non-human animal thinks that way, either. Death even can be understood at all only in face of life.
And, finally, for us Bible-respecting Believers, the first chapters of the Bible are not known to even mention anything like Hell. It just mentions death; And that fact normally would implicitly emphasize only a promise of resurrection, which is what God is all about: promises of good.
I’m not sure what you mean there, but we may agree there, to a deep extent. For my case, I am aware that, even the YEC community is not homogeneous as to what inerrancy ought to imply for how to correctly exegete a given verse or passage. I am very much YEC myself, but I have deep disagreements about some very status quo ideas in that community. Among these ideas are those concerning what it means for the book of Genesis, in particular, to be Divinely inspired and infallible. Many YEC’s assume that Genesis is written from the point of view of an ‘omniscient narrator’, and thus that it specially spells out only what it wants for us to know or understand about its subjects’ lives in relation to the origin of the text and to what the text spells out.
Ah, well - I am influenced by The Creationist Debate to some extent when Arthur McCalla argues that the ID/Creationists are really concerned about inerrancy.
In my Protestant days, I wasn’t troubled by inconsistencies in Scripture. Did Jesus die before or after the curtain was torn? Who cares? If the Ancient Church didn’t bother to harmonize the Gospels over this detail, why should it matter to me?
It seems that the concept of infallibility that some have today doesn’t match what existed in the first and second centuries, when copyists felt qualified to change difficult readings and even add to the original, as was the case with the pericope of the woman caught in adultery.
I’m not worried about that.
I believe that the world is extremely old. I like what Professor Kenneth Miller has written in Finding Darwin’s God. I don’t like reading in some homeschooling text that nothing has been created since the first week in Genesis or that the “stripes” having to do with Earth’s magnetic field in the ocean floor are a misunderstanding and really don’t exist.
Why couldn’t God have made the universe instananeously?
Because although God could have excercied such power, in fact we see in Jesus a God who comes humbly into His own creationand and lets people make their own decisions, and by extension God always acts with servant love. God’s acts are from love and gives creation and all the secondary forces in the universe. God is Trinitarian love and not just omnipoent Being. God as Trinity does not dominate the universe bit allows it freedom to change and develop. God has instead put patterns of laws fthat guide but do not dominate but allows natural potentials do Trinitarian loving will. Love gives freedom to all things.
Good talk. And the problem includes de novo Adam. If Adam was specially created by God, all of the knowledge that the rest of us learn in childhood had to be implanted in Adam and Eve’s brain, including such basic things as how to walk and talk. It’s another form of creation with appearance of age, except that now we are talking about a human being, not inanimate matter. To my mind, that’s much more problematic.
Very problematic indeed! For humans, if we don’t learn a language (spoken or other) by age seven, we don’t learn to speak properly. And what language would Adam and Even speak, anyway? How would they raise their young? And if God can make a magic man with an implanted language and other AI features, what’s to stop him from making another one?
@Reggie_O_Donoghue is no doubt quoting the typical time frame estimated for the Earth’s Creation - - 6,000 years ago, or about 4,000 BCE, give or take a dozen years or two.
Good point. I stuck to just two parts of Physics (astrophysics and radiometric decay). Many other fields could be covered in a similar fashion (geology, paleontology, biology, linguistics, archaeology, etc.).
Absolutely. “Appearance of age” is the ultimate special pleading. Once we are willing to take that step, all bets are off. Anything and everything becomes a possibility. The only limit is the human imagination…
This is a curious (and perhaps novel) view - Genesis states that God created Adam and Eve and they were in a place that differs radically from what we know as nature. Adam and Eve communicated with God - that to us if far more difficult for us than talking and walking. I must say that this outlook seems to me to be an attempt to state a dogma derived from a naïve view of how evolution may be ‘overlaid’ onto Genesis.
Oh, no, not a “dogma” by any means. It’s just a little something I like to call “logic,” but not everyone accepts its validity.
I haven’t shown you my view of that yet! It’s actually not too far from the view expressed by Fr. John Breck of the Orthodox Church in America. Fr. Breck was Professor of New Testament and Ethics at St. Vladimir’s Seminary and Professor of Biblical Interpretation and Ethics at St. Sergius Theological Institute, Paris, France.
Well yes, but in my church it comes from honest ignorance. They think that maturity of the earth would mean full grown trees and adult first couple, not evidence of mutation, vestigial organs, etc. If one says that the evidence if she meant a belly button and scar from appendectomy, that’s not what they mean…and I think they would understand better. It just shows how much there is to learn for all if us.
I’m sorry. What is “it”? On the rest, I agree that most folks just haven’t thought through their opinions on creation and Adam. But, if it doesn’t affect their faith one way or the other, I feel no great need to force them to “face facts.” I’m mainly concerned with the folks who cannot help but notice the facts around them, and they can’t help but seek answers.
Very true. Two years ago, when I showed up at BioLogos, I knew next to nothing about evolution because it wasn’t a problem for me. I had to educate myself in order to speak to those who do have a problem with it, because the conflict was destroying their faith. I have still barely scratched the surface of what there is to learn…
I am sympathetic to the view that Genesis may pose more questions than answers to our scientific view, and I do not pretend to have a comprehensive/scientific/theological understanding (far from it ). However I feel that adding ;things’ that seem obvious to us does not make Genesis more comprehensible - for all it may be worth ( ) I try to grapple with what if given in Genesis, and than see if science can add anything to that.
So my point is to state what is there, and the central point is that a couple were placed in a garden and communed with God - a big, big, thing to consider.
). However I feel that adding ;things’ that seem obvious to us does not make Genesis more comprehensible - for all it may be worth (
) I try to grapple with what if given in Genesis, and than see if science can add anything to that.