Jeremy Christian: Image of God and Free Will?

[Jeremy_Christian]

@John_Harshman

it results in distorting both books, as you have consistently done here.

In my experience, it doesn’t distort both books, it clarifies both. Here’s another result of viewing things through this framework …

Oct2018 …

@Jeremy_Christian

Gen6:7 - So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created

Tell me if this makes sense Hebrew-wise. It doesn’t say “kill”, it says “wipe”. In a regional flood scenario the single most significant thing you accomplish by flooding a valley and putting a man and his family on a boat (and not just out of range), is you isolate that man and his family. “Wipe from the face of the Earth” could just mean that. Right? Clear from the land?

@deuteroKJ

You’ve raised a view for me to think about. My dissertation was on Deuteronomy’s theology of exile. One of the things I noted was that the terms for exile are not the normal ones, but death/annihilation terms (e.g., Deut 4:25; 28:63). While I make theological implications of this (i.e., exile = death), it also helps interpret the use of death language elsewehere, e.g., the so-called genocide texts in Joshua (i.e., the kill-them-all texts could be fulfilled by removing the Canaanites from the land and not necessarily literally killing them).

@swamidass

@Jeremy_Christian I’m impressed. That is an interesting take, which is plausible enough to catch the attention of a Hebrew prof. Good job. Curious to see how it cooks.

Contrast that with the run around you are getting on “free will”…maybe some of your points are more plausible than others.

Now, in this thread, I’m using the same tactic to tackle “Imago Dei”/Image of God

In this context ‘Image of God’ is nature. Everything in the universe. All life. Including Gen1 humans. We, from Adam forward, are the divergence. We are the only things in existence to not be an accurate representation of God. Nature, the image of God, is the perfection that we destroy.