I honestly don’t understand your point(s). Why or when God chooses to inspire Scripture is up to him. The apostolic age has passed, so there is not God-ordained authority for canonicity (at least as historically understood).
Perhaps you understand scriptural “inspiration” differently than classically understood? Or maybe you assume somewhere that my approach doesn’t allow the Bible to be applicable (i.e., to speak to) today?
I’m saying that scripture should challenge any worldview or culture we live in, because we know there’s a spiritual battle going on. How does your approach fit within that battle, within the battle that maybe we don’t need God…
If we’re saying any certain bible passage applied to a past culture more than to us, or not to us, in the battle where we need correction today, then we might to be holding on to idols in our current culture. We just don’t make ones of stone or wood today.
Yes, totally agree. I think we’re closer than it first appeared.
My approach begins with understanding the Scripture within its original context. But the subtext is larger worldview concerns that transcend that culture. For example, I see Gen 1 challenging atheism, polytheism, pantheism, panentheism, gnosticism, etc., etc. These -isms manifest themselves differently at different times and places, but the root problems are the same. This is why I say the story would be different, but the message would be the same (i.e., if Moses were penning Gen 1 today).
Agreed. As John Walton has popularized, “The Bible is not written to us, but it is written for us.” That is, it’s just as applicable today as back then. But we must do the grunt work to uncover the theology of the ancient text to make the “translation” to today.
I think we were talking past each other.
Thanks. I appreciate the reply and glad we have common ground.
If your book includes all that out of one chapter, it would make a fascinating read!
Is it not Biblically valid to interpret Psalm 148:1, 4 as:
1 Praise the Lord from the general ‘up there’;
Praise Him, too, in the special, atmospheric sky!4 Praise Him, you special ‘up there’ of the general ‘up there’,
And you H2O in-and-above the special ‘up there’.
In other words, is there not the possibility that v. 4 is meant as emphasis of this view of v.1b?
I say yes. For, consider that Psalm 19:2 is referencing Psalm 19:1. In light of Psalm 19:2, there can be no mere celestial-only kind of parallelism in Psalm 19:1. This is because Psalm 19:2 is of the heavens both day and night.
The only way out of this marriage-like, binary view of Psalm 19:1, given Psalm 19:2, is to deny that the whole of Psalm 19 hinges on the psalmist’s phenomenological and personal metaphysical concerns. Onr could, for example, suppose that v. 1 is the exception: that the psaImist’s concern in v. 1 is that from some cosmically-celestially omnipresent frame of visual reference on the merely celestial realm. But such an exception is precedent for doing the same for various other verses, such as for the ‘tent’ in v. 4b. But what is that ‘tent’ to the Children of Israel?
2+2=4 has every polemic utility against things such as financial fraud. And yet it is not a contingency of polemic aims. The same would be the case for the Universal Self Evidence of Divine Design (USEDD) as a genuine self expression on God’s part. USEDD is not the product of random ‘Divine’ selection from the limitlessness of logical possibility per God’s power and freedom, and neither is a given part of USEDD (Psalm 19, Romans 1:20, 10:18).
God ‘logically could have’ created Adam and Eve in an neutrally empty environment. He even ‘could have’ created them inside a miraculous, temporary, observation bubble just prior to the first moment of Creation Week. He even ‘could have’ had this Bubble be able to slow down the time difference between inside it and outside it, so that Adam and Eve, at will, could have watched any part of Creation Week at any rate of slowness they wished. They could have watched as the Bubble replayed the first parts of Creation Week over and over, and this in such a slow rate that they could learn deeply of the cosmic physics that were involved. But, too, God then ‘could have’ provided them all the technological instrumentation to aid them in that ‘cosmological’ study. He also ‘could have’ made for them endless sandwiches, for as long as they were pleased to remain in the Bubble studying this cosmic physics.
But imagine if:
(I)
Imagine if every human, ever since humans began, have lived their lives bound inside a Star Trek like space ship, and this ship stranded drifting indefinitely far out from any galaxy.
(II)
This ship would have artificial systems for all factors humans require to survive, and to live ‘normally’. And, just like the Enterprise, all those systems would require maintenance .
(III)
The main difference to Star Trek in this scenario is that, as just implied, the version of humanity that lives in this ship has no natural knowledge of anything but what this ship, and its strandedness, allows. Another difference to typical Star Trek stories also is key here: Beside its own recycling systems, the only raw materials available for this stranded ship’s maintenance and expansion is content-variable clouds of microscopic matter that randomly and constantly are ejected from nearby galaxies. The ship has all the technology required to ‘farm’ these clouds, but even that technology must not be allowed to degrade too far.
(IV)
The ship has artificial systems for (1) expanding the size and mass of the ship to accommodate any increases in human population; (2) synthesizing food; (3) generating gravity; (4) producing air pressure and air content; (5) producing thermal and lighting conditions; (6) maintaining hull integrity; (7) etc… The main issue of this scenario is that the health, and the very life, of humans in this scenario respectively would suffer or cease if any one or more of these artificial systems were not maintained.
(V)
In this scenario, the ship’s data banks do not contain any information on the fact that there are planets, much that there is at least one planet has free gravity, free air and air pressure, free thermal regulation, a biologically based system of many factors of life support, and all that other things we actual, terrestrial natives take for granted about our Earth, our Sun, and wider cosmos. The only possibility for such information is a single, paper-like copy of Genesis 1:1-3.
(VI)
This copy of the account is made of a very durable paper-like material, such that it has held up well enough for the thousands of years in which this account has been handled by the humans who live in this ship. Electronic copies have been made and distributed from the start. But the only natural evidence that the paper copy is worth the story its presents is that no one has ever been able to determine just what it is of which its paper like material is comprised. Various occasional attempts have been made, with all manner of technology afforded by this ship. But to no avail.
.
Six results of this Scenario of Contrast
So, now consider what would be our intuitions and conceptions of ‘everything’ if we all lived in that ship. Would we have all the conceptions necessary to understand the most metaphysically basic things which, in reality, we actual humans have in our real, Earth-based lives? I don’t think so. I think there would be a number of severe preclusions to our making any foundationally right sense of anything, either of
(I) of the Completed Creation,
or
(II) of Genesis 1 as an account of origins and Divine Design.
The following six items are suggested as results of these preclusions.
We would be so vastly far from any star that we would think stars are just points of light. Thus, unlike what it is that, in reality, we see of the Sun and Moon from Earth, our lives inside this ship would show us no apparently large celestial bodies. At best, we could see only the kinds of things that terrestrial humans see of the Milky Way galaxy without telescopes. Therefore, viewing the cosmos from that ship, far from any galaxy, there would be no near bright body to uniquely serve our needs either for visible light or for energy. And we could never achieve an everyday perception of a deep connection between light and heat. This is because the lighting fixtures in this ship would give off little or no warmth; And, because any actual local points within the ship that produce all our ambient heat would give off none of the kind of light by which we humans see.
Worse, our best everyday sense regarding water would be that it is a liquid nutrient; that it has great potential for thermal storage; and thus, great potential for some kinds of thermal exchange. It would never suggest to us a way of life that is unbound by this ship.
Still worse, the ship’s food synthesizers would rob us of any sense of just about everything worth knowing about God and Creation. Likewise, the ship’s air filtration and air pressure systems would affect to rob us of any knowledge of God. And our lack of a blue sky in ‘daylight’, on a planet that has trees, would make us foolish idiots as to the Divine origins of anything worth knowing. ‘What is a “tree”, momma?’, our children would have to ask, assuming we even know such a word ourselves, or its referent. ‘What is “day” and “night”, momma?’ ‘What is the “sea”, momma?’ These words, and their referents, would be esoteric, at best.
Even worse, our metaphysics would obtain due to our sheer cost in time, labor, expertise, and technology in maintaining this ship, and would be warped in favor of a truly deep servitude to the concerns of mere survival. For, without our toil in maintaining its functions that keep us alive, we all surely would die when the ship fails. Thus our conceptions of the Creatorhood of God, and of His Ordinary Providence, would be obscenely lacking. Our very conception of human dignity would be bound horribly to that of the individuals’ earning a place on the ship. If a given individual, in his own liberty or need, simply lived a day without working, that individual easily could be committing injustice against both himself and all his shipmates. Only by special prior permission from them all could he ever cease toiling for even one day. Therefore, the very idea of a regular day of rest would be obscure to us; and that of a yearly multiple day holiday would be completely invisible to us. For we have no natural day, and no natural year, living in that ship.
Imagine, in living all our lives inside this space ship, we somehow came to be well informed, merely by theory and record, that a planet based, water based means of life would leave us free from the costs of maintaining this ship. Imagine we even came into possession of Genesis 1. Would we think that such a hope was realistic? Or, instead, would we condemn even Genesis 1 as some kind of wicked lie? How could we even understand most of what Genesis 1 says? We, in fact, would see Genesis 1 as the most abominable thing possible. We would say, ‘If God wanted us to live on a planet, He would have created us on a planet. But this “Genesis 1” thing makes almost no natural sense, so it cannot be from God. It seems to say that God created the physics, here in vs. 1-3. So this we find self evident in it. Nevertheless, is an “animal”? So this, clearly, is a pagan account of origins, like an absurd kind of Fairy Tale! At best it is an involved code that no one can be sure to correctly interpret. So we must get rid of any copy of this “Genesis 1”! It is an absurd and false hope! It has been contrived by charlatans, or by those of unsound mind!’
Worst of all, we would be inclined to the ‘logic’ of the science-fictional Vulcans regarding marriage: that marriage is some kind of collectiv ist loyalty to ‘the survival of the species.’ Thus, human social virtue would, for us, be mere fantasy . This is because our main set of concerns would be that of the values of (1) toil, and (2) the human power to make and contrive things to help us maintain the ship. We might have an open ended supply of raw matter that drifts through extragalactic space, as random clouds of it may continually be propelled out of host galaxies. But we would have no natural knowledge of any of the main things of which Genesis 1 is about.
So this Stranded Space Ship hypothesis shows that our physical and metaphysical cosmological virtue depends on our native relation to the Ecological Earth. This space ship scenario, if it were reality, would be cosmologically misleading to us, both directly and in regard to Genesis 1. This scenario might be described as the ultimate ‘Space Ship Cosmology’. It would cause us to have a bankrupt philosophy of cosmology, anthropology, and theology.
And item 4. shows what the Sabbath rest is about: rest. The command to keep the Sabbath rest was not intended to make it mechanically impossible for humans to work on the Sabbath. It was intended to help preserve the practice of resting on the Sabbath. Just because there was no Sabbath command in Genesis 1 or 2 does not mean God did not, at that time, intend for humans to cease producing physical wealth every seventh day. If anything, an original lack of any such command was itself the best expression of the nature and relevance of the Sabbath rest.
The shamayim of the ha-shamayim.
There are two mutually contrary ways of interpreting this. One way is that which you assume is the only most natural way: the ‘up there’ and the even MORE Distant ‘up there’. By analogy, ‘The whale is so huge that it cannot fit in the kitchen, nor in the whole house.’ The idea you are focusing on here is that of mere SIZE.
But notice that God’s actions and will or at issue in this verse, not just his omnipresence. The verse is clearly concerned for all three, since it refers to the temple that humans made for Him, even if this was made at His detailed direction and command.
So it is clear that God’s omnipresence is not the only issue here. Rather, the central issue is relationship and purpose, as that temple ALREADY is.
So, given the faulty kind of concept of that relation and purpose that the Children of Israel had, even up to and including Peter regarding reaching the Gentiles with the Gospel, it is plausible that the way in which this verse means those two words is akin to saying, ‘The Designer and Maker of the whole Creation is not willing to work simply on behalf of the whole, much less of the most special part of the whole.’ The only way this interpretation would be precluded is if the issue were that merely of God’s size or omnipresence.
But the degree of plausibility of this interpretation is based on what seems to HAVE to be their already knowing that He is AT LEAST EFFECTIVELY omnipresent, per His being the Designer and Creator. They already knew that He knew of all things. So the verse is not about size in itself, but about something which, for them, was the crucial issue. In short, the verse is not a mini-tutorial on God’s omnipresence.
And as I say in my long of two replies to you by way of PM, shamayim and ha-shamayim are not so certainly the same.
A third, and possibly THE most simple, interpretation is that the verse’s use of the phrase, ‘ha-shamayim and shamayim ha-shamayim’ is a single all-inclusive specification of the realm above us, akin to humans’ universally most natural sense of ‘the heavens and the Earth’ of Genesis 1:1. High and low. Specifically, that if God is higher than are we, then a binary identification of that ‘high’ would be ‘the celestial realm AND the Earth’s atmosphere’.