You’re back to lying about what people have said.
You seem to have this model in your head where if anyone disagrees with you then they necessarily believe some set of things you have learned. This results in you ascribing things to people that they not only haven’t said but often have said they disagree with.
Like above, you retreated to “genealogy gaps” when I didn’t even mention them – that’s the go-to response and it comes from having to have all your categories fit into a modern scientific worldview that is at root terrified of asking how ancient literature really worked.
Because you insist on stuffing modern science into the text, making God look like a liar or incompetent. But the big problem is that by so doing you throw away the majority of the actual message!
That internal consistency is far greater than the YEC position can even approach. YEC tries to make it all about God needing to conform to a scientific – even a materialistic – definition of truth. That by its very nature strips out most of the actual message – and it’s taking away from the message that detracts, not some humanistic idea of consistency.
No, it doesn’t – it ignores what you’re reading into the words of those other writers, which you do by ignoring the ordinary use of language; people can say, “As it was in the days of Noah” without even believing that Noah existed, and you ignore that common use of language.
No, I infrequently cite scripture because scripture is not a handbook of ancient history, culture, or literature, it is a collection of theological writings.
It’s frustrating that you invoke archaeology frequently when it supports tour view of the Old Testament but ignore it when inconvenient. I say this in reference to you comment about the fact that the Tabernacle was pretty much a copy of Pharaoh’s war tent, something we know from archaeology; it is as much a fact as Hezekiah getting that tunnel carved to improve Jerusalem’s water supply, yet you reject it. The response shouldn’t be “No, it isn’t!” (when it clearly is), it should be, “Why did God do it that way?” – not only because that’s just good sense but because that’s where the meaning lies: what did it mean for the Israelites to have Yahweh among them in a pharaoh’s war tent? (right along with what did it mean to the Israelites that Moses told them about the Creation using an edited version of the Egyptian creations story?)
And thus you throw away the theology of the scriptures.
No scholars decided on the canon. The canon was the result of all the churches examining the documents available and deciding what was to be read in church. They exchanged copies of what they had, and started asking other churches “What do you read in church?”, which led to lists being made. Local groups of churches, when they held meetings, came to agree on what should be on the list of what is to be read in church, and then bishops did the same when they got together, and so the process proceeded upwards. By the time councils at Rome or Hippo or Carthage got into the act, the decisions had been made; they were doing nothing more than reporting them.
That’s backwards, BTW.
You’re confusing two different things: the recipe, and the ingredients. What the Spirit guided the churches to put in the canon is a completely different matter of having tools to understand the text.
The first statement is sound; the second is risky. There is only one direction for doing theology and getting doctrine: it starts with Christ, nowhere else – and in starting with Christ, it starts at the Cross. Anything else is not Christian theology.
This is why so much of what is called doctrine doesn’t even reach the level of theology: it isn’t about Christ. Theistic evolution isn’t about Christ, YEC isn’t about Christ, day-age creationism isn’t about Christ, gap theology isn’t about Christ, etc.; those are all about trying to force the text to fit a modern worldview, which makes them all wrong (theologically) from the beginning because they aren’t theology, they’re mindgames to make people comfortable with the text by reshaping it.
Theology has to address the question, “Who is Jesus?” according to one Orthodox scholar (and an Anglican one, for that matter) or it isn’t theology, it’s musings of the flesh.
That’s the consistency that the early church looked for: they didn’t care if you took early Genesis literally or figuratively or allegorically, they cared if how you read it told about Jesus. And a later theologian argued that scripture should be taken all those different ways, just use them to point to Jesus!
It’s not a bad idea at all to make a verse from the Transfiguration the measure of theology: “They saw Jesus only”.
