The Flood "Removed" not "Killed" Everyone?

It is important to stay on topic. Most if this digression will be moved to another thread. Please do disrupt conversations this way. You can always start a thread of your own on a topic like this.

In this flood story, Do you think God drowned everyone or not?

@Jeremy_Christian is arguing not. I’m asking everyone to stay on topic as much as possible.

A fairly common Lutheran perspective on this is Adam has faith in the promise God makes in Gen. 3:15 (the protoevangelium). Therefore, in faith and hope in God’s promise he names the woman Eve.

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Some see Gen 4:1b–translated as “I have brought forth a man, the LORD”–as a statement of faith referring back to Gen 3:15 (as if Eve was looking for the fulfillment). Do you know of a Lutheran position on this?

I’m not sure there is a “Lutheran” position on this. In fact, Lutherans are rather frustrating when it comes to establishing “official” positions on exegetical issues.

However, what you’ve put forth here is certainly known. In fact, without consulting my Luther’s Works, it seems to me and my somewhat unreliable memory, that Luther may have made such a statement in his Genesis lectures.

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You should see Orthodox Church. We believe in minimal dogmatism. Which is one of the reasons I’m staying despite being told (on internet) several times that I should just become an Episcopalian.

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If it were Abraham’s uncle Fred who told him to do it, I’d agree. But this is the creator. The whole reason Abraham even has something he cherishes, or exists to even know what a cherished loved one is, this creator made that happen. He created the universe. Obviously He knows what He’s doing.

If the one making the demand is this God, how can that be immoral or illegal?

It is clearly a fictional story made up by a group who adhered to vastly different morals than today. Today, the Abraham story is considered a psychotic delusion father that had to be stopped by liking his son by an angel.

How does one mental separate “commands from God” and psychotic homicidal delusions?

Well, considering Jesus has been realized, there’s no reason left for God to tell anyone to do anything. He’s done with His part. The rest is up to us.

Not at all. It makes perfect sense. The goal is free will. This is a test of that. For the test to truly be a test, the decision has to matter. Will Abraham go with God’s will or his own when, by design, his own will will certainly be tugging him in the other direction?

Quite a complex story to have been written over such a long expanse of time by so many authors and remain consistent and relevant in this day and age. I don’t see this as “clearly” fiction.

Good, glad God has no reason any longer to tell anyone to do anything anymore. So why are Christians trying to tell everyone what to do and what not to do?

What kind of psychopathic God would make up such a psychotic test on a man and his child? Didn’t God realize the damaging psychological impact this would have on the child? Abraham terrorized Issac.

It is certainly too psychotic to tell today’s children the story. They’d have nightmares.

That’s not specifically a Christian trait. That’s a human trait.

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There’s a much bigger goal here. God’s concern is making existence populated with a bunch of individuals with their own wills and their own minds. Here He’s testing His creation. It’s all part of realizing a much bigger thing.

Human culture and society was progressing just fine for over a million years before God’s supposedly picked Abraham to start a group of chosen people in modern day Israel about 4000 years ago.

Actually, human culture didn’t progress much at all for hundreds of thousands of years until the birth of civilization right where/when Adam and Eve were created. God’s involvement where Abraham was concerned was a direct result of that. Through Adam and Eve God introduced the element that makes us most human. That’s when human culture as we know it today truly began.

Wrong. Look at the peopling of the Americas more than 10,000 years before the Abraham story.

And what about this: