I’m glad that you caught on to the specific reference to Genesis. I thought of adding everything you mentioned, but decided on simplicity instead.
However, I do find the interaction between the Hebrews and Babylonians to be really interesting. I’ve been on a bit of an ancient civilizations kick lately, and the civilizations in Mesopotamia are certainly some of the most fascinating. I highly recommend the “Fall of Civilizations” youtube channel to those who enjoy history documentaries.
I have no doubt that there were some one-off events during the thousands of years humans lived in the region. It also makes me wonder how many stories were spawned by the big changes that happened right after the last ice age as massive glaciers melted and drastically changed shorelines.
More accurately, it was not the Munster Rebellion (1535) that birthed the pacifist Anabaptists, but it was an event that crystallized the existing pacifist dissenters to coalesce so that they and their followers would not continue to be painted with the same broad brush as the Munsterites. (As I said above to @NicholasB , adult baptism was never actually practiced by the Munsterites so whether they should be really referred to under the broad-- and not very useful pejorative label “Anabaptist” is questionable in the first place).
In any case, the Anabaptist confession of faith, the Schleitheim Confession (1527) —which I just noticed actually predates the Lutheran Ausberg Confession of 1530) was also drafted BEFORE the Munster Rebellion and it explicitly mandates non-violence.
Menno Simons, a leader who help coalesce pacifist Anabaptists in the Netherlands, renounced his Catholic priesthood in 1536, just after the Munster debacle. Based on names of the dead in Munster, it is strongly suggestive that Menno had a radical brother who died in Munster, which probably triggered him to formally promote and preach pacifism (as written in the earlier confession from Schleitheim) among the Dutch anabaptists.
I feel like I’m about to start trying to focus on ancient Egyptian literature from bronze to Iron Age. Maybe earlier depending on what’s out there. I was told the Egyptian guy often goes over texts that are not really commercially available but still just floating around in journals. Want to go through the Egyptian book of the dead as well. See how that afterlife compares to what we see in pre Hellenistic Jewish writings. Looking forward to going through lots of the stories from then.
Seen some good books on hoopla digital that looked pretty nice too. Free audiobooks. Differs by location though.
Certainly, sola scriptura should never be interpreted as nuda scriptura. Prima scriptura is much more correct.
In the context of the early Reformation, it was all about the status of the Magisterium. Luther has boldly but correctly proclaimed that both the Popes and the Councils could err. Therefore, the authority to settle the contentious issues rests only with the Scripture; so, Christians are theoretically entitled to directly refer to the Bible.
But Luther has never contemplated reading the Bible without any framework - and, indeed, it is abjectly wrong to read it apart from the Ecumenical Creeds (at the very least, from the Apostles’ and the Nicene Creeds).
Certainly, the latter are distinct from the Scripture as they are not the apostolic writings. But they sum up the universally accepted faith of the early post-apostolic Church - that is, of the same Church that has distinguished the apostolic writings from the other kinds of pious Christian literature and transmitted them to subsequent generations.
The “verdict” of this Church with regard to the content of the apostolic canon and the “verdict” of the same Church with regard to the essence of the apostolic faith are not the same; but to be on the safe side, one should uphold both of them.
In other words, the Ecumenical Creeds are not the norma normans; but they are the very peculiar and, indeed, indispensable kind of norma normata. These Creeds were deliberately devised to be the compendia and criteria of the Christian orthodoxy. So, they are to play this role, while the Scripture should be acknowledged as the primary - but complex and sometimes ambiguous - source of the regula fidei. The attempt to turn the Bible into the Creed has done nothing good to modern Christianity.
Yes, the western Christian denominations used to persecute dissenters for many centuries and have only recently abandoned the idea. Hopefully, it seems that there was a fullhearted reappraisal. As for the eastern Christians - well, they’ve stopped persecuting religious minorities when they themselves became persecuted minorities. Overall, accepting the freedom of conscience as the human right was incredibly difficult and painful for the vast majority of Christian denominations. Sad but true.
Yes, sorry, you were correct about that fact. I got my "M"s mixed up…it was Thomas Müntzer who apparently did not rebaptize. I think, however, my more general point about the origin of pacifistic Anabaptism still stands.
Also, this highlights the problem for historians with lumping all the left-wing reformer groups of the day under the umbrella term “anabaptist” when those groups often shared little else in common. The Munsterites, obviously, did not adhere to statements of faith in the Schlietheim Confession that had been drafted earlier by the original Anabaptists. So those “mainstream pacifist Anabaptists” considered Munsterites a rogue, fringe group and not part of their movement at all. It’s like lumping the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons, and Baptists as the same thing just because they don’t baptize infants…
Of course, politics played into this name-game. The original (pacifist) Anabaptist groups were keen to distance themselves from violent, rogue groups but the Magisterial reformers who wrote the history books were happy to lump all rival dissenters into the same category to justify the general persecution.
Happily, the apology from the Lutherans to Anabaptists issued in 2010 heals old wounds by addressing this historical mis-representation. The statement asks for forgiveness “from God and from our Mennonite sisters and brothers” for past wrongdoings and the ways in which Lutherans subsequently forgot or ignored this persecution and have continued to describe Anabaptists in misleading and damaging ways."
I would add the “four withouts” of the Chalcedonian definition: fully God and fully man, two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.
But this is getting more than a little astray from the topic!
I came across something interesting: during the Middle Ages people interpreting Genesis made the same mistake many make today – they tried to make the scriptures fit science. This meant reading Genesis in accord with the known science that everything was made of four elements, air, earth, fire, and water. Some added spirit and light to the list so as to include heavenly things, though some interpreted spirit as being a form of fire and air, but pretty much all accepted that there were only a few elements.
They had their own version of young-earth Creationism, but applied their own known science, explaining the early chapters of Genesis in terms of their handful of elements. Their science was heavily tied to Aristotle, so their views had heavy doses of what we would call philosophy – and so did they; to them what we call science was “natural philosophy”, the philosophy of nature.
Being tied to Aristotle, they had a plain explanation for what “bring forth” means in the first Creation account: obviously it was the divine equivalent of spontaneous generation, bits of dirt and rock transforming into living things.
When it came to the Flood, they got quite creative in explaining it in terms of the four elements; I think my favorite is that “tohu” in the opening of Genesis was a substance with the potential to become any kind of matter but did not interact with the world until it took on some substance – and to get all the water for the flood God drew on a great reservoir of tohu and turned it into water, then to end the flood He drew on more tohu and added it as earth to make the land rise out of the water. There’s a significant degree of honesty in this and other explanations since rather than invent complicated and fanciful physical mechanisms that require repeated divine interventions they just went right to the divine interventions.
This illustrates the point that trying to make scripture talk science is a waste of effort: Christians today might respond that our science is correct, but that’s exactly what they said back then, too. And it hasn’t been that long since creationists were inventing scientific mechanisms to account for the universe being eternal – and expounding that it must be eternal because God is eternal.
What part of this comment is “full of grace?” Tolerance of conflicting ideas is the very least part of love and respect. Maybe you should rephrase a bit here.
I dont feel that I said anything was wrong. It was a waste of my time to continue a conversation with them. I blocked them. Has nothing to do with different opinions. Same as if you repeatedly mentioned the same thing to me, I would also just block you because it would become an even greater waste of my time to continually repeat myself.
If someone repeatedly calls my approach lazy. I line out why it’s not. They continue. I just wasted more of my time on this.
I think that we SHOULD interpret scripture in light of science. Not that we should expect every observation made in scripture to match what we know today, but if scripture is trustworthy in any way, it must speak about the world we live in, not a mythical or misshapen world of some ancient imagination. Everyone has been talking about previous views of the world as if these views are all about the same in value, just different in emphasis or in premises. But just as I would not want to return to some other views about medicine or dentistry, there is no reason to look at the world through the eyes of Aristotle or other ancient sources of wisdom. Nor do I think the Bible is bound by any of these. Science today is not a “world view” in the sense that Buddhism, or communism, or some other belief system is. Science is the extension of our senses, sight, hearing, feeling, etc. by instruments, and the collection and explanation of the evidence that we become aware of with our extended senses. Why should we pretend that this collection of knowledge doesn’t exist when we look at the Bible? If I read from the point of view of someone who knows about the big bang and evolution, I read Genesis 1 as an amazing description of how our universe and our planet came to be. I am not “twisting scripture” or making “the scriptures fit science.” I am simply reading what is written and seeing what I already know in the words I read. It’s just not that hard. I don’t know why there is so much resistance to reading science and scripture together.
A part of it may be that in a few cases we see small differences that come from the Bible having been written by a foreign human author. In one place in the OT there is a reference to grass hoppers having four legs. This sort of thing doesn’t matter. But in Genesis 1 scripture describes our world at considerable length and in some detail.
To see what is there, we need to drop some old habits of how we have always read these words. For instance, nothing happens in the first verse. This is strictly introduction, a warning that we are about to hear about creation. The next thing that we need to see is that in verse 2, the earth does not exist. Without a shape and without any substance, a thing doe not exist in the real world–it can only be a concept. So when it says the earth was tohu and bohu, it is saying the earth did not yet exist. The waters over which the spirit of God hovered were “waters” in his own realm. If you accept these two ideas, the rest falls into place pretty easily.
Having seen this I cannot in any way think of Genesis 1 as an ancient myth, as any retro fitted Babylonian story. It is God speaking to his later, older children in our day and time. It tells us that God is real and that he wants us to know it.
Scripture has been made to talk Greek and Latin and English with vowels and punctuation and chapter and verse division that does not exist in the original Hebrew, so it has been forced into other ‘worldviews’ for centuries. Science is just another language with which to translate the Hebrew using knowledge from God’s creation. Language, including Hebrew, is created by man and each different language is built around a human worldview. The God of Hebrew scripture is depicted as the creator of the world so it makes sense to use His creation to understand what scripture is saying about it. People are not trying to make scripture talk science, they just want to see if it might talk sense. Most people do not have the aptitude or desire to restrict scripture to ancient Hebrew thinking.
But it was not written to us, so we should not expect it to “speak about the world we live in”. And “misshapen world of some ancient imagination” is insulting to the Holy Spirit Who chose the writer.
No, we’ve been talking about previous views of the world because those views are the foundation for the ideas presented by writers who lived with those views as truth – and noting the fact that if you don’t understand what the writer meant and his original audience heard in those terms, you aren’t gearing the message, you’re inventing one of your own.
All ancient literature is bound by the worldview, language, literary type, and culture within which it was written. Indeed including “language” in that list is redundant because the worldview, literary type, and culture are part of the language, they are the lenses through which the literature must be viewed no less than the lenses of a telescope are what distant galaxies must be viewed.
Try these, which are written in English:
She was argo at the servo s’arvo.
Eh, that Bruce was Blind Freddy.
My garburetor sure uses the hydro!
Your wheels’ bonnet is banjaxed!
Naff off, shirty!
Unless you know the sources, you aren’t likely to make much sense of those. These are mild illustrations of the need to know the exterior context of a piece of literature in order to get the message.
No one is saying that.
Only in passing – and that isn’t what the first Creation account is about.
That’s not what the Hebrew means, so no – that it not what it is saying. It’s a nice concept and I would love it if that was what the Hebrew meant, but it isn’t.
People do it regularly, including here. Every time someone insists that the Flood is the cause of all sedimentary rocks, they are trying to make scripture talk science. Every time someone insists that Genesis tells us that the world was made in six 24-hour days, they are trying to make scripture talk science. And the result of this is that they make up all kinds of nonsense in order to try to justify their view that the scripture talks science.
If they don’t get the message that the “ancient Hebrew thinking” contains they’ll rarely see it talks sense – just look at all the militant atheists who fail to grasp that the scriptures are ancient literature and so claim “errors” about science . . . which comes from a worldview that says truth must talk science, and so they conclude there is no truth in the bible.
You are absolutely correct. YEC tries to make a strict literal translation of scripture talk science. The ancient Hebrew people did not have the literal vocabulary for it. By attempting to apply it that way, YEC is placing ancient human limitations on God with a man-made language. It discredits God and devalues scripture.
Oh, but I think it is written to us, and for us. Sure, just as we have to translate from the language of the human author, we sometimes have to translate from the human author’s “worldview.” As when the human author speaks of a man’s kidneys as his source of compassion or courage. But if this Bible is at all what believers claim it to be, it is written by the unseen author with us in mind, with us as intended readers. And as Jesus remarked in Matthew, God revealed his truth to little children rather than to the wise. Those who are “wise” think they already know everything. You don’t have to know ANE myths or even Hebrew to understand Genesis 1. You just have to read the words (and perhaps it helps to know a bit about cosmology).
Well, all purely human literature, yes. But the whole thing that makes the Bible different from other literature is that the spirit of God is behind it, inspired it, controlled its production. Of course we still use reasonable methods of understanding, but we should be open to the subtle hand of God in what we read.
Well yes, you are pretending that the knowledge we have gained through science doesn’t exist when we read scripture, if you don’t allow that the words of scripture might be referring to that knowledge.
That’s not what Creation is about? How do you know? What do you base that on? Have you noticed how many words in the account refer to details about the world around us? Water, sky, land, trees, plants, seeds, fruit, fish, flying things, things that creep and crawl, livestock, etc. It’s not about these things?
Tohu and bohu? Well, maybe you have a different lexicon, but in my copy of Brown, Driver, Briggs the entry for tohu (sorry I don’t know how to type Hebrew font here) is:
n.m. formlessness, confusion, unreality, emptiness…
The actual messages? Do you have a direct line to the Almighty? I thought that line was the words that are preserved in scripture; I just read the words.
I do know what you mean about myth carrying messages; but the words and their arrangement tell us when scripture has engaged in myth. I don’t hear it in Gen 1; I do hear it in Gen 2. But that’s another story.
I would dispute that there is any ancient Hebrew word which captures the modern sense of “reality” or “unreality”. On the other hand, formlessness, confusion, and emptiness can be plenty real.
