Introducing Chad from Middle Ground

I believe that Adam and Eve’s offspring interbred with the “sons of God”. How God created them is something I’m open to hear folks out.

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Depends on how one defines evolution. I agree that the below two understandings of evolution are in opposition to the text.

  1. If one sees evolution as the claim that all creatures arose from a single celled organism through an “unguided” processes.
  2. If one holds to the idea that God is not necesssary for life to exist and for all the organisms to come into being. i.e, all life can be explained through natural processes alone without needing God to make sense of it.

I would assume @chad does not hold to the above .

Hi, @chad; welcome to the forum. enjoyed your articles.

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When you can’t win the arguments, just indoctrinate the children from a young age using media. It works, on average. This comment was in really poor taste, but at least it is an honest admission of strategy.

When you talk about building a “bridge” between opposing theological positions, what you’re implying is that 1) both sides have got it wrong and 2) your “middle ground” position is actually the right one to hold. Kind of a Hegelian Dialectic. Is this accurate?

I think you’re confusing Chiliasm with Day-Age theory.

I can’t speak for @chad, but that is not what I mean. Have you read this yet?

I can’t tell whether you’re addressing my question about the Hegelian Dialectic, or my comment about indoctrinating children.

I was referring to this:

The point about indoctrinating children didn’t seem to need a response. Of course I’m not suggesting that, nor do I have the power to indoctrinate your children. Rather, I was taking confidence in the fact that good theology and good science can overcome indoctrination, and that this generation of student wants a better way. You don’t, but they do. :slight_smile:

St. Cyprian claimed that the seven days of creation represented seven thousand years. And both Justin Martyr and Irenaeus linked “The day of the Lord is a thousand years” in Psalm 90:4 with the idea of Adam dying on the same day that he ate the apple.

There may have been additional Church Fathers with similar views. Those are the first which come to mind. So that’s three Church Fathers who could be described as embracing some sort of thousand-years association with Genesis 1 and 2.

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Take, for example, the “young earth friendly Old earth creationism”. Unless I’m confused, it would have to be a synthesis of both positions, not completely in agreement with either side as they currently stand. So that would seem to fit the Hegelian Dialectic.

By saying that a “middle ground” is better than either current position, wouldn’t that have to logically mean that the author is disagreeing with both sides?

A successful synthesis is often a refinement of both sides, which in time might be come to be accepted by both sides as an improvement on the thesis and antithesis, even if there might have been debate initially. That is how the dialectic works. The synthesis ends up extinguishing the synthesis-thesis.

But I don’t think that what @chad is after here, nor is it the main value. Even if a particular synthesis attempt is not successful, the dialogue about it is intrinsically valuable, and end in itself. Even if we cannot agree with each other, the ability to engage with one another is a relational synthesis that’s most people quickly see is better then the quagmire of opposing sides talking past each other, as so often happens in the creation wars.

That’s chiliasm. Not Day Age.

That view is not mutually exclusive with taking the days as literal periods of time. Again, it’s chiliasm. These guys were YECs, not OECs.

Really?

That seems to be a distinct question from Day Age. Can you produce some references? I am no expert here. Maybe you are right, but I don’t see it.

Yes, that’s exactly what I was saying. That’s the Hegelian Dialectic.

Hopefully he’ll chime in, because using the term “middle ground” seems to imply exactly that.

So is he attempting a synthesis of views, or not? If one of the opposing sides is correct, then no synthesis is needed. So by attempting a synthesis, we must be saying that neither side is sufficient at present.

I certainly agree with this. I don’t think we should talk past each other. However, I don’t see any need for synthesis whatsoever. The way to overcome theological disagreement is not to compromise (as is so often done in politics), but to go back to the source. What does the Bible say?

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Don’t get hung up on the eschatology; the main idea I’m getting at is that these guys believed that all of history would be completed in a total of 7000 years. Each literal day symbolized a 1000 years of history. It’s an appealing idea, even to me, but I have no idea if they were correct. Dr. Carter’s biblical timeline calculations don’t generally validate this concept.

Well, by attempting a synthesis, as I did in the GAE, you are implying that both sides have legitimacy. That means you are saying that both sides are right. So your logic does not follow. Even if one side is correct, doesn’t mean the other side doesn’t have legitimacy or even correctness in some ways.

That may be because you are a very linear thinker, and you seem have a very hard time seeing things from other people’s points of view. Even if you are right, though, there might be legitimacy to other points of view.

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In this case, that is what the GAE will end up being :wink: . There are always hold outs for the thesis or antithesis, and that’s where the debates are loudest, but most people are not so invested to turn their back on a good synthesis.

Yes, you are correct to flag this.

chiliasm is the claim that Christ will reign for a literal 1000 years on earth after his second coming.

The term “millennium” referring to that 1000 year reign is Latin while chiliasm comes from the Greek word CHILLIASMOS (some would prefer the transliteration KHILLIASMOS), which derives from CHILIOI, the Greek word for thousand.

So both chiliasm and millennialism refer to the 1000 year reign of Christ.

No, that’s not the extent of what it means, but only a part of it. It is the belief that each literal day is a symbol of 1000 years of earth history. It is a belief many early Christians held, at the same time as believing that the days God created in were literal days.

The days of Genesis and the Church Fathers discussion appears to be taking a different direction than what Chad was talking about. But I’ll just add that Origen emphasized that the first part of creation week couldn’t involve 24-hour days because there were no celestial bodies for making that unit of time meaningful. And Clement of Alexandria saw Genesis 2:4 (“in the day that God made the heavens and the earth”) as reason to consider the six days of creation as figurative days.

So @Chad was no doubt thinking of the variety of views among the Church Fathers. His statement which set off this discussion can be debated as to how Church Fathers views compared with modern day views on day-age interpretations but his point that they reached their positions “without any knowledge of modern science” is quite valid.

Worth noting, in the early centuries of the Church, chiliasm was basically what we today would call premillennialism. (I grew up in a Dispensationalism tradition, which was complete with colorful easel charts of the seven thousand-year dispensations of God dealing with mankind through history. The Schofield Bible was de rigueur for every card-carrying Dispensationalist.)

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