You are pretty good at rhetoric. I’ll give you that.
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You are pretty good at rhetoric. I’ll give you that.
I appreciate the compliment. We can hone one another’s skills.
Being a bible believing Christian is a credential? Lol. Can I get my badge so I can get into the after parties?
What you said is equalivent to saying this doctor is a Muslim. He’s probably not a good doctor.
As @AllenWitmerMiller demonstrates in fine detail, you have misapprehended the doctrine of perspicuity.
The consequence of understanding the doctrine as Calvin and Luther defined it is this: all of us in the body of Christ must collectively apply our very best scholarship in ancient Hebrew and ancient Near Eastern culture (the cultural context embedded in the Hebrew Bible) to understand what’s really going on in Genesis 1 - 3.
We don’t need to do this for the sake of salvation, of course. But we must do this if we want to claim we are doing our very best to be faithful to the entirety of the Scripture, and to our God who revealed it.
Best,
Chris
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Sure, I never said Perspicuity applies to everything. Just the fundamentals. Of course, if we want to say it applies to salvation only, then I could ask “What do we need to be saved from? Where do we learn about it?”
If you want to bring up the views of Luther, then how about this quote?
“When Moses writes that God created heaven and earth and whatever is in them in six days, then let this period continue to have been six days, and do not venture to devise any comment according to which six days were one day. But if you cannot understand how this could have been done in six days, then grant the Holy Spirit the honor of being more learned than you are. For you are to deal with Scripture in such a way that you bear in mind that God Himself says what is written. But since God is speaking, it is not fitting for you wantonly to turn His Word in the direction you wish to go.”
—What Luther Says. A Practical In-Home Anthology for the Active Christian, compiled by Ewald M. Plass, Concordia, 1959, p. 93.
So you want to invoke Luther’s views on science and the Bible to refute modern biology and geology? Okay, then, you disciple of Luther, I invite you to join Luther in defending true faith in the Bible against the heresy of heliocentrism:
There is talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that is how things are nowadays: when a man wishes to be clever he must…invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best! The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth.
Second, I fully accept that yowm in Genesis 1 is a reference to a 24-hour day. That does not mean it is a historical/journalistic reference, however.
Best,
Chris
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Read what I wrote. I asked you What did I miss? during my years of study, including the year spent studying Masoretic Text of Genesis under a rabbinical scholar. We still don’t know anything about your experiences studying the Hebrew scriptures in Genesis. You keep dodging these and other questions.
Time to head to the gym.
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If I can try to parse the meaning of your statement here, you seem to be saying that Genesis 1 teaches literal, 24 hour days, but it is simply wrong? Or rather, you think it’s talking about literal days but it doesn’t intend to be taken seriously as true?
I really see no strong arguments in that article that succeed in supporting the literalistic interpretation against a figurative-historical view for Genesis 1-11 wherein the text represents genuine realities but sometimes expresses them in figurative or mythical terms. (As Tolkien said to Lewis, or so I’ve heard, this is the myth that is true.) Cosner rightly points out the etiological function of the texts, but is just wrong that this requires her interpretation rather than something more like Hoffmeier or Wenham’s. Same deal with references to the primeval history in NT: they are not difficult to accommodate in a figurative-historical view. Counting the number of waw consecutives can tell you that it is narrative rather than poetry, but it doesn’t tell you that the narrative is strictly literal rather than containing figurative or mythical elements - or deliberately referencing the myths of neighboring cultures for the purposes of subverting them and teaching theological truths couched in figurative-historical terms. And so on. The Genesis text plausibly allows for this view. The theological meaning of the text does not really change if it teaches that God created the world, even if he didn’t literally do it in 6 days.
It’s quite different with the Gospels. Here’s one obvious difference: the Gospels record recent eyewitness testimony, compared to early Genesis’ recording of a culture’s oral tradition about events in that culture’s distant past. That changes the genre and style of the text. Here’s another difference: the theological meaning of the Gospels clearly would change if they were figurative, to the point where it wouldn’t even make sense for those stories (not to mention the community that told them) to exist. The Gospel texts don’t plausibly allow for a figurative view. I agree with you that there is a sense in which both are “historical narrative,” but to end the discussion there is to paint with far too broad of a brush.
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This statement here sounds an awful lot like you’re denying the divine inspiration of Genesis.
Why do you say that? Do you deny that God inspired Scripture through human authors?
Edit for clarity on what I mean by that: it seems abundantly clear from Scripture that God did not just dictate it word for word (though every word is inspired). Rather, he used the words of his people.
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I feel like this video, released just yesterday by Ben S after a long hiatus, is relevant for this thread:
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But observational science confirms old earth. Distant galaxies show the universe is old. Radiometric dating shows the earth is old. The geologic column shows that the continents are old. Faunal succession and phylogenetics show that life is old. That’s astronomy, physics, geology, and biology all against you. That isn’t “stories”; that’s hard science backed up by hard data. You can have your version of Genesis or you can have science, but you can’t have both.
Incidentally, you already reject the biblical views on the shape and motion of the earth. I expect you have some rationalization for rejecting the clear statements of the text on that.
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These are days to God, not man. God, who is outside of time, cannot be measured by our clocks.
Not simply wrong. Intended to be taken seriously, as a figurative representation of the cycle of work and rest that God intends for all of us.
Best,
Chris
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There is no way I can read your statement without arriving at the conclusion that you are placing the Gospels on a higher level of trustworthiness than Genesis on account of them being written closer to the events. And that would only be a relevant consideration if the text is fallible and not divinely inspired.
So you’re saying the text is literal AND figurative at the same time?
In the parable of the sower, Jesus talks about rocky soil. Is it literal, figurative, or both? I say both.
It’s literal in the sense that his audience understood exactly what rocky soil is, and could probably go dig some up. Rocky soil was not some fictitious thing like a unicorn or a dragon.
But the rocky soil was also figurative; it represented the state of people’s hearts.
The parable of the sower is quite true, and to be taken seriously–even though it is not true in the journalistic/historical sense.
Is it possible for us to think of the mornings and evenings in Genesis 1 in the same way that we think of the rocky soil in Matthew 13? Why or why not?
Best,
Chris
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No. There is no literary or contextual reason whatsoever for us to regard Genesis 1 as a parable. It is an historical narrative, and the narrative flows smoothly throughout the whole chapter & book.