Me too. I was very pleased with the dialogue.
Thank you I appreciate you saying so. Once you get past the “newness” of it (which is not a Lutheran habit), I think what I am saying is a very very Lutheran way to look at it. I have mentioned before, and bring to your remembrance, that the LCMS position on early Genesis seems to disagree with Luther on such issues as physical death before the fall. To me the way the Lutherans in America are treating early Genesis does not “fit” with the way they treat the rest of the text, which is beautifully Christ-centered.
Exactly. And that’s what the Christ-centered model does, but the focus is on the resurrection not the length of the days. So for example, in the Christ-centered model the seventh day, the real Sabbath, is not a 24-hour period in the life of Adam. Indeed I show from the scriptures that the morning of the seventh day did not occur until the Resurrection. The first Sabbath is both History and Prophecy.
I believe as I was on my way out of Toledo in early 2017 I got a version which still needed work to Mark Love and Ryan Kleimola of Trinity Lutheran in Toledo. I don’t know if they ever even read it. It was Ryan who put me onto the idea that Martin Luther himself did not hold to the no-physical-death-before-the-fall view but he didn’t know what to make of it. In typical LCMS fashion he just kept on doing what he was doing.
After that we were home for a good stretch of time and attended the little LCMS church where we live in Arkansas. The elderly pastor there is about at retirement age, or past it really. He is a very good preacher and an even better pastor. Very easy-going. But I don’t consider him a theologian and I kept my mouth shut.
Since then we have had a couple of short-term projects and while the preaching in evangelical churches is dreadful and infuriating once you have sat under people who do the Law-Gospel framework right, we have wound up going to other churches for these temporary sojourns so far.