Curious what theologians throughout history made of Genesis 4

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OK, Jeremy. I understand your doubts about the Bible and organized religion. But I still don’t know whether or not you call yourself a Christian. I won’t be upset if you don’t – I know lots of fine people who aren’t Christian. But it would help me if you would answer that question, which I asked long ago. It makes a difference in how I respond to you. If you hold the views about the Bible that you have stated, and also consider yourself to be Christian, then I would tackle your remarks differently than if you said that you weren’t Christian and you don’t intend your views on the Bible to be representative of mainstream, traditional Christian teaching.

Of course, you might need to define “Christian”, since it means different things to different people. For most churches, it implies acceptance of the Nicene Creed, for example, but certain people who call themselves Christian, such as (if memory serves) the Christadelphians and Jehovah’s Witnesses, don’t accept the Nicene Creed. And again, I have no intention of bashing or belittling you if don’t accept the Nicene Creed. But it would help me to interpret your remarks about Jesus, God, the New Testament, the Old Testament, etc. if I knew what sort of Christian you were – or if you considered yourself a Christian at all. I’m not looking for a confession so that I can judge you, but so that I can understand where your interpretive remarks about the Bible are coming from.

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@Jeremy_Christian

I don’t think there is any biblical warrant for the Image of God being degraded appreciably by the host creature we call Humans.

For me, this is one of the acid tests of what it means to be bear the image of God (setting aside such novel problems as birth defects and other biological problems with the human brain, mind or nervous system).

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I am a Christian. I don’t identify as any particular denomination and I don’t attend a church, but I do believe in Christ and that he died for our sins.

I never claimed to be a good Christian, but I am a Christian.

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In my mind, indigenous/naturally evolved humans, homo sapiens, right through to Indigenous cultures that still exist today, are the “image of God”. Adam and anyone “of Adam” have a free will independent of God’s, and therefore cannot be an accurate image.

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@Jeremy_Christian,

This is how I see you … ASCENDING…

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I never leave the house without my shoes.

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@Jeremy_Christian

Unless you are some kind of Zoroastrian-bound thinker… the ascent won’t be about leaving the house.

The Kingdom of Heaven is not “up there” … and if it really was “up there”, at least 12 hours out of the day, the up direction will be pointing in generally the wrong direction …(or eventually will be)…

So, in short, you won’t need your shoes… but a nice comfy pair of socks just might be perfect…

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Socks and a good hoodie and I’m set.

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OK – that’s clear. Thanks for that. So here is the situation, then. You must believe that at least part of the Bible is divinely inspired, or you wouldn’t trust what it says even about Christ and the Atonement. So then your intellectual quest is to try to make sense of the rest of the Bible in terms of your faith?

The problem with historical-critical scholarship is not that it says there are various sources that compose the Biblical books. The problem is that it has often been presented in such a way as to make the Bible look like a messy accident of Israelite literary history. That doesn’t sound like a very promising vehicle for a firm, solid, coherent, life-directing religious position, does it?

So sure, we can say that Genesis 1, was written by, say “P”, and Genesis 2-4 were written by, say, “J” or “J-E” or whatever the current fancy is. But unless the scribes just threw them together haphazardly, because they were documents they just happened to have lying around, there must have been a reason for including two different “origin” stories using different names of God, in markedly different styles, etc. So what was that reason?

In all the years I studied historical-critical authors, I never got any clarity on that question. Indeed, most of the Biblical scholars I knew considered it an “unscientific” question, one that belonged in a church or seminary or synagogue or rabbinical academy, not in an academic university setting. Indeed, I remember many grad students and professors openly mocking the idea that Genesis overall (as opposed to its fragments) had any “teaching,” as if anyone who was looking for a “teaching” of Genesis was a naif who didn’t know the historical and literary score about how Genesis came into existence. But fortunately I studied under some oddballs, who thought that maybe such an “unscientific” question was actually rather important for understanding the overall trajectory and meaning of our current text of Genesis. This eventually led me to embrace the “holistic reading” or “narratological” school of exegesis, which, while it doesn’t deny the existence of sources, doesn’t let them dominate exegesis (as they previously did). It’s a school of interpretation that, while it doesn’t require a traditional religious orientation, is more “tradition-friendly” than German-style historical-critical scholarship was.

That’s why I recommended that you have a look at some of the “holistic” readings that are out there. They may help you with your personal religious questions, by giving you a way of reading the text that is both scholarly and non-hostile to the idea of treating the Bible as revelation, rather than just a messy human construct.

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One of us is. Do you think that they really believe that

Neither one of them says anything close to that. Your other two examples have problems too. Still need to work on clarity.

You don’t seem to realize what your words mean. You have just said that there are atheists who have made a willful choice to deny God. And you imply that they may be in the majority. Name one.

You overestimate my disdain for Christians. There are plenty of Christians who agree that atheists can be as moral, honest, or reasonable as anyone.

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Yet you stated “You quoted Hebrews, not Paul”, indicating you do not believe Paul wrote Hebrews.

Why don’t you accept the majority view of scientists on matters such as AGW and evolution? Why do you object to the historical critical method?

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But in the conversation with Jeremy I put no stress on the existence of such atheists. I put all the stress on the atheists who disbelieve in God not as an act of will. Thus, you are not even trying to meet me constructively in dialogue. You are picking areas of possible disagreement and trying to pull the discussion over to them, instead of responding to what I clearly regard as the main point of what I wrote. It’s this non-cooperativeness, this readiness to fight, this unwillingness to say, “I partly agree with you,” that is so typical of the atheists on this site, and is rapidly turning the site into an intellectual cesspool governed by the prickly indignation of atheists.

Sure, I believe that there are atheists whose rejection of God is not purely due to intellectual reasons, but has some element of the will in it. I’ve met many of them personally, in my own life, but they don’t write books or blogs and you wouldn’t know their names, so there is no point in my listing them. And of the published atheists, I’m quite certain this is the case with Dawkins and Coyne, and I’ve read enough of their blogs and books to get the feel of them. If you disagree with my interpretation of their writings, you have the right to do so, but I take no notice of your disagreement, as in the past I’ve observed your inability (or unwillingness) to grasp the very obvious meaning of statements made by others. You tend to use sophistry to avoid inferring the most obvious meaning (as you did in the case Hebert the genetic barcoder).

Regarding overt hostility to religion, and massive denunciation of it, if you don’t pick that up from Dawkins’s savage booklength attack on religion (which embarrassed even fellow atheist Michael Ruse), what can I say? If you don’t see Dawkins’s remark about raising kids in one’s faith as “child abuse” as overtly hostile to religion, I don’t know what it would take to convince you that the man doesn’t like religion. Sunday school teachers as child abusers. Right. The man has no axe to grind. Right.

Sheesh. I’m dropping this pointless conversation.

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I don’t believe Paul wrote Hebrews, but you accused me of coming to that conclusion by picking and choosing scholars that I “prefer”, which is outright false. (I won’t say it’s a “lie”, but your willingness to impute to me a preference that I have never stated is to me almost as bad, morally and academically, as a lie.) In fact, on the question whether Paul wrote Hebrews, I have no preference. I couldn’t care less who wrote it. (Shall I add boldface to the italics, to make sure that gets through to you?) But Jeremy seems to care what the majority of scholars think regarding Genesis, so I thought maybe he should care about what the majority of scholars think about Hebrews.

I don’t accept the majority view of scholars on Hebrews because it is the majority view. I just happen to agree with it. I have endorsed no principle that one should accept the majority view in any field. I think for myself.

I already said (but apparently you read too quickly to notice it) that the historical-critical method is valuable and useful in its place. But it’s a good thing that its virtual monopoly on academic Biblical studies (which was a fact when I started grad school) has been broken. It was a case of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, all the world looks like nails”; the historical-critical scholars were obsessed with isolating alleged sources, with parts rather than wholes. And as I reported earlier, I many times in classroom settings, at academic conferences, and in print, saw the marked hostility of many of their number to any notion that a book such as Genesis had any “teaching”; for them, only uneducated pious folks still thought that “Genesis” as a whole could have any “teaching”; to them Genesis was a ragtag assembly of sources, edited together sometimes quite clumsily and with obvious seams, a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a religious text, only even less coherent in its result. The narratological folks came along and pointed out how short-sighted and narrow this was. Historical-critical scholarship still has a place, but only as a useful method, not as the method of Biblical scholarship. And that’s a vast improvement.

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To me, these texts being cobbled together from multiple sources doesn’t lessen its credibility, it increases it.

The reason would be to reconstruct the full text as much as possible because the source texts were not complete. This same story, told in multiple forms means this story was so revered that it was recorded multiple times by such differing sources that they had different names for God.

These multiple sources were so similar that they could be edited together in this way.

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@Eddie,

I assume that @John_Harshman would prefer that you change the semantic value of your statement: namely …

“There are atheists who have made a willful choice to state that they do not think God exists.”

For the record, while there just might be some self-proclaimed atheist who believes God exists but wants to deny this God, it would be less provocative to set that class of atheists aside for the moment and focus on atheists who don’t think they are denying an existing God, but simply don’t think there is a God that they would be denying by stating their personal disbelief.

Whew… that was a rough paragraph to get through. Does the bold paragraph satisfy both parties, Eddie and John?

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I simply noted that you choose to agree with some Bible scholars in the majority, and disagree with others. This is exactly the same thing you do with science.

I’m not talking about preference, I’m talking about the fact that, as you have just repeated, you don’t believe Paul wrote Hebrews. So you’re not as agnostic on it as you portrayed.

Ah, the purest form of auto-didact, the one who prefers to “think for myself” on matters which are settled by professionals in the field. Welcome to Dunning-Kruger territory.

No, I already addressed that in a previous post; it is completely irrelevant to my question. I note you didn’t answer my question about your attitude to the majority view of scholars in science, either.

Why do you imply that narratology and the historical critical method are mutually exclusive? Narratology is just another form of literary criticism, and the historical critical method already uses literary criticism. The only real difference is that narratology typically treats the text in its final form rather than over its lifespan, synchronically rather than diachronically, but without denying the diachronic elements of the text, and without denying the relevance of its socio-historical context.

Everything you say about historical criticism just sounds like standard fundamentalist fearmongering and anti-intellectualism. Your comments on narratology also really date you; looks like the last time you were familiar with current critical methodology was back in the 1970s.

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Your ability to conveniently forget what you wrote is astounding.

What you wrote, way up top, was:

To which I answered, I have no preference at all regarding the scholars who write about Hebrews.

And now you come back with:

Um, sorry, but that is exactly what you were talking about. You charged me with accepting the scholars that I “preferred” regarding the authorship of Hebrews. Your words are there for all to see.

I didn’t. In fact, I several times put in qualifiers to make sure no one drew that inference from my words. You’re a careless reader.

I never said I had no opinion on the authorship of Hebrews. I said I couldn’t care less who wrote Hebrews. Not the same thing. I think Paul didn’t write it, but I’ve nothing at stake if someone proved me wrong. I’d simply say, “OK, Paul wrote Hebrews.” Big deal. Who cares who wrote it? What it teaches is either true or false, and it isn’t one iota more true or less false because Paul rather than someone else wrote it.

You already know my view on that, so why ask again? I regard all demands that one should conform to majority opinion to be mere appeals to authority and without rational force. And I apply that not just to science but to every academic field, to politics, etc. I often happen to agree with the majority, which is not surprising. But I don’t try to find out whether or not a given view is a majority view before I form an opinion on it. So whether I end up on the majority or minority side is an accident of circumstances. And that’s the way it should be.

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@Jeremy_Christian You are a good human being. And that’s all that matters. Live long and prosper. :sunglasses:

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You don’t know that.

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Do you really think these atheists exist or are you just doing it for Eddie? I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about. I think he’s talking about people who actually decide to believe God doesn’t exist because they get some personal advantage from that belief, rather like Pascal’s wager in reverse. I don’t think those people exist either, though he assures me that he personally knows lots of them.