The atheists on this site – and even some of the Christian scientists – would laugh out loud if they heard you say this about me. They have repeatedly belittled me for not accepting so-called scientific consensus, whether or evolution or global warming or other things. They have called me a “creationist” and “fundamentalist” and so on for expressing doubts about the consensus. You perhaps have not noticed my various other postings here.
I’m happy to trust what God tells me through the Bible. The problem is that I don’t agree with the way you interpret the Bible. Has God given you the job of deciding which interpretations are correct, and which interpretations are necessary? Did you get this commission in a dream, or a vision, or how? Can you tell us the date on which you received this authority, and the circumstances?
This may be so, but then you have to explain how the vast majority of people trained in the relevant sciences have failed to notice this overwhelming evidence.
I take it that you agree with me that it is wrong to impute “error” to Jesus if he is merely employing typical Hebraic hyperbole in his expression, to make a teaching point. You agree, then, that even direct statements of Jesus, reported as direct statements by the narrator, cannot always be taken as historically or scientifically accurate. You admit that they have to be read in context, in light of Jesus’s intentions.
I agree that hyperbole should not be claimed without warrant. However, in the case of the Flood story, it’s not hyperbole I’m claiming. It would be hyperbole if the Flood story only meant a great local Flood, but expanded it into a universal Flood because the author got “carried away” in his Hebrew style. But that’s not my view. I think the authors depicted a global Flood not out of hyperbole (exaggerating a real event), but as a deliberate storytelling choice, connected with the point they were trying to make.
How did you establish that the genre of Genesis 6 is “history”? What literary or other criteria did you employ to establish this?
Not specifically about the Flood narrative, but we know that Augustine rejected the 24-hour day reading, and we have Origen’s statements that much of the Old and New Testament is not meant to be read historically. You will of course disagree with Augustine and Origen on these points, but I’m not mentioning them to prove they are right, but merely to show that non-literalist readings have existed and can be found in major theologians. Augustine’s thought is central to Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant.
And by the way, my motivation isn’t Darwinian. If you read the rest of this site, you will see that I have taken many bruises for questioning aspects of Darwin’s thought. I read Genesis the way I do for reasons having to do with science or evolution or modern cosmology etc. I read it the way I do as a result of study and personal reflection on the training I received in a very good graduate school. None of my teachers ever suggested that I should read the Bible in any particular way to accommodate evolution or any other scientific view. They told me to focus on the text, not on external matters such as what modern scientists had to say.
I’m not asking you to agree with me; I’m just explaining why I don’t agree with you. I expect you will go on reading Genesis literally, and that is fine with me; you’ll do less harm that way than if you were a modern liberal minister from a mainstream Protestant church. But I don’t hold by literalism any more than I hold by liberalism. A pox on both their houses! And I intend to keep supporting people who are being bullied by literalists, just as I support people who are being bullied by Darwinists.
He appealed to a story well-known to his readers to make a point. Paul and Jesus do the same. In any case, the Church did not think the Flood story to be important enough to incorporate into the Creeds. The only “historical” statements in the Creeds concern Jesus, nothing from Genesis (beyond saying that God made heaven and earth).
Well, yes, I’m not claiming that every single thing in the Bible should be found in the Creeds. But it’s interesting that nothing from Genesis 1-11 (beyond a general affirmation of Creation) makes it into the Creeds. Not even the doctrine of the Fall, which someone such as yourself would think essential and utterly “core” to Christian belief. Don’t you find it odd that it’s not mentioned in the Creeds?
In fact, the Bible itself, and the authority and inspiration of the Bible, are not affirmed in the Creeds (beyond saying that Jesus rose again according to the Scriptures, which meant not our Christian Bible but the Old Testament Scriptures, and even then referred only to the parts pertaining to Messianic prophecy, not to Genesis). One would think that if accepting the truth of the entire Bible as both inspired and inerrant were essential to Christian faith, a statement that the whole Bible is inspired and inerrant would be vouched for in the Creeds – but it isn’t. The Creeds are about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, not about the Bible. “Whoever wishes to be saved”, says the Athanasian Creed, must believe certain things about the Trinity, the Incarnation, etc. It never says that whoever wishes to be saved must “believe in the Bible”. The Creeds don’t ask Christians to affirm or believe anything about “the Bible” as such, though they ask Christians to affirm selected items taught in the Bible – overwhelmingly from the New Testament, not Genesis.
Yet if you removed the Flood story (and the very few later endorsements of it) entirely from the Bible, the core of Christian teaching would remain completely unaffected. Creation, Fall, Prophecy, Incarnation, Trinity, Redemption, and Eschatology would all remain untouched. It doesn’t come into the mechanics of Fall and Redemption. That’s not to say it’s of no importance. But its historicity does not figure in the workings of the central Christian doctrines.
I would suggest that the Christian faith is founded upon the religion of Abraham, as modified by Moses, the prophets, and Jesus. The stories in Genesis help to contextualize that religion in a cosmic perspective, but there is very little evidence that most of the stories in Genesis were important for the day to day life of the average religious Israelite. The Old Testament refers only glancingly to most of the material in Genesis 1-11. Even Jesus and Paul only refer to Genesis in a spotty way. And the narrators of the Gospels seem to be able to state their message with very little concern for what Genesis said. Even the inclusion of Adam in the NT genealogies seems to be pro forma, and in any case only two of the four gospels bother with genealogies, which indicates that the link with Adam isn’t deemed central to the gospel message. The American transformation of Christianity from a Gospel-based religion to a Genesis-based religion is a remarkable mutation in Christian religious history.