Question 3

[ConfuseddotCom]

Do all Christians believe the world started as described in Genesis?

 

[Genersis]

I guess this is the hit sequel to "Question 2".

No.
A lot of mainline churches do not see it as literal.
If I remember correctly, these include: Catholicism, Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheranism, Methodist and others.

 

[americanvet]

I guess this is the hit sequel to "Question 2".

No.
A lot of mainline churches do not see it as literal.
If I remember correctly, these include: Catholicism, Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheranism, Methodist and others.

What he said. But with one addition, some in these groups do. So no not all Christians believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis.

 

[theFijian]

Do all Christians believe the world started as described in Genesis?

What a loaded question. Just how is it described?

 

[Aalia]

Mostly, yes. There are some different takes on the specifics - such as whether it's meant to be entirely literal or not - but God making the earth, heavens, and mankind is pretty much a universal Christian belief (it's in the Bible, after all).

 

[MikeBigg]

Do all Christians believe the world started as described in Genesis?

No - I don't think it happen literally as described in Genesis.

I think there are still things to be taken from the account, but I don't think it was literal.

I do think God was involved in creation and that He created humankind different from animals. I don't believe it took 6 periods of 24 hours to do it. Nor do I believe, as many do, that it happened only a few thousand years ago.

There is also a school of thought that something already existed at the start of the account in Genesis. This is based on more recent translations from the Hebrew with a newer understanding of Hebrew as used in ancient times. I'm not sure where I stand on that one yet.

I have friends who believe it literally and some don't. It doesn't affect our core belief in a God who loves and cares for us and wants to be involved in our lives.

Kind regards,

Mike

 

[Cjwinnit]

"We believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth".

 

[ianb321red]

Do all Christians believe the world started as described in Genesis?

No. Liberal theologians allegorise Genesis.
However, agnostic scientists such as Robert Jastrow believe in the Genesis account:

"Now we see how the astronomical evidence supports the biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy."

 

[MorkandMindy]

Some Fundamentalist Christians are fond of saying that atheists and agnostics are 'running away from god in order to satisfy their own sinful desires'.

I've never found that to be true, and the quote from Jastrow is of an agnostic admitting to not having an answer and that at that point in time an explanation he believed to coincide with Genesis (creation ex nihilo) was as good as any he was aware of. He is being as unbiased and un running away as anyone could possibly be.


But as the Fijian and MikeBigg, both Christians posting above, pointed out that might not be the actual Genesis-type version of creation despite Jastrow's admission. Ex nihilo is the version favoured at present by the Roman Catholic Church.

All the other creations in Genesis are actually transformations; Adam was crafted from mud, and Eve from a rib taken from Adam, nowhere else is there a creation from nothing. Genesis 1 speaks mainly of separating light from darkness and land from seas and for the earth to bring forth life.

2 Peter 3v5 But they deliberately forget that long ago by God’s word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water.

And as MikeBigg pointed out the Hebrew may indicate a transformation from what was there rather than an ex-nihilo creation, in keeping with the Epistle of Peter.

 

[MorkandMindy]

As wonderfully open minded as Dr. Jastrow was, it appears he may have been somewhat wrong on both counts.


I think of causality as description rather than a quantity. The idea that every effect has a cause is already in the word 'effect'. Plenty of things happen that don't have causes and therefore are not effects.

The argument for the existence of God as the first cause requires believing that every event has a cause. Take snow as an example as there is so much of it around. It starts with moist air which is a random mess and after cooling there form billions of five and six pointed snowflakes each with a detailed structure.

Did each part of each snowflake have a creator, a cause, or does that sort of thing just plain happen in nature?

Under some conditions very complex forms arise by themselves, that is visibly true.

Not each of the features on a snowflake has a cause. Is there maybe one cause though to account for the whole cloud? Somebody must have made it???? Well, if the snowflakes within the cloud are a result of the way nature works then there is no reason why all the snow clouds can not also be the result of the way nature works.

It is a mistake to believe that every event has a cause, many systems result in complex structures and complex structures of structures and nothing within them requires specific causes or any causes at all, they simply form that way.

 

[Robban]

As wonderfully open minded as Dr. Jastrow was, it appears he may have been somewhat wrong on both counts.


I think of causality as description rather than a quantity. The idea that every effect has a cause is already in the word 'effect'. Plenty of things happen that don't have causes and therefore are not effects.

The argument for the existence of God as the first cause requires believing that every event has a cause. Take snow as an example as there is so much of it around. It starts with moist air which is a random mess and after cooling there form billions of five and six pointed snowflakes each with a detailed structure.

Did each part of each snowflake have a creator, a cause, or does that sort of thing just plain happen in nature?

Under some conditions very complex forms arise by themselves, that is visibly true.

Not each of the features on a snowflake has a cause. Is there maybe one cause though to account for the whole cloud? Somebody must have made it???? Well, if the snowflakes within the cloud are a result of the way nature works then there is no reason why all the snow clouds can not also be the result of the way nature works.

It is a mistake to believe that every event has a cause, many systems result in complex structures and complex structures of structures and nothing within them requires specific causes or any causes at all, they simply form that way.

Fingerprints.

 

[ebia]

Do all Christians believe the world started as described in Genesis?

The question would better be, what sort of description is (the early chapters of) Genesis?

All Christians believe those chapters are a theological description of God's purposes in creation and the situation we are in. The question of historicity is the wrong question to be asking.

 

[theFijian]

No. Liberal theologians allegorise Genesis.

What absolute rubbish. Is Paul a liberal theologian? After all, he allegorises Genesis in Galatians 4. What is it about literalism that turns sensible people into such non-thinkers? To interpret something in its literal sense in spite of its literary sense is to interpret it incorrectly.

However, agnostic scientists such as Robert Jastrow believe in the Genesis account:

"Now we see how the astronomical evidence supports the biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy."

Big-bang cosmology can be retro-fitted into Genesis 1 and that's about it.

 

[ianb321red]

What absolute rubbish. Is Paul a liberal theologian? After all, he allegorises Genesis in Galatians 4. What is it about literalism that turns sensible people into such non-thinkers? To interpret something in its literal sense in spite of its literary sense is to interpret it incorrectly.

Polite and gracious as usual....

We're obviously talking about the creation account here on this thread, not the old and new covenants..

The literary sense of the Genesis creation account IS literal (NOT poetic as some people claim). Therefore to not interpret it literally is literally incorrect as I shall now explain:

Adam and Eve are presented as actual people, the narrative outlines important events in their lives, they gave birth to literal children, the phrase "this is the account of.." is used frequently to record history in Genesis, OT chronology puts Adam at the top of the list, NT chronology puts Adam at the beginning of Jesus' literal ancestors, Jesus referred to Adam and Eve as the first actual "male and female" (Matt 19:4-5), Paul describes a literal death bought in to the world by a literal Adam (Rom 5:12-14), Adam is called the "first Adam" and Jesus the "last Adam" in 1 Cor 15:45 showing that Adam was seen as a literal historical figure, Paul in 1 Tim 2:13-14 mentions when "Adam was first formed, then Eve" showing that he was referring to literal people, the temptation of Eve is mentioned in 1 Tim 2:14 and 2 Cor 11:3 and in both cases described as literal events..

It is not written in a poetic/ allegorical style as some claim. The style of Genesis is NOT consistent with Psalms or Proverbs which are both examples of Hebrew poetry, Genesis 2 is part of the creation record and not poetic, the creation element of Genesis has a straightforward historical narrative similar to any other OT historical narrative i.e. using "this is the account of....", NT writers refer to creation events as historical.

 

[ConfuseddotCom]

I am currently reading Genesis, but it is not something I can take literally I'm afraid.

 

[theFijian]

Polite and gracious as usual....

We're obviously talking about the creation account here on this thread, not the old and new covenants..

So? Paul allegorises so surely that makes him a liberal, surely that means he doesn't really believe the Bible!

The literary sense of the Genesis creation account IS literal (NOT poetic as some people claim). Therefore to not interpret it literally is literally incorrect as I shall now explain:

Adam and Eve are presented as actual people, the narrative outlines important events in their lives, they gave birth to literal children, the phrase "this is the account of.." is used frequently to record history in Genesis, OT chronology puts Adam at the top of the list, NT chronology puts Adam at the beginning of Jesus' literal ancestors, Jesus referred to Adam and Eve as the first actual "male and female" (Matt 19:4-5), Paul describes a literal death bought in to the world by a literal Adam (Rom 5:12-14), Adam is called the "first Adam" and Jesus the "last Adam" in 1 Cor 15:45 showing that Adam was seen as a literal historical figure, Paul in 1 Tim 2:13-14 mentions when "Adam was first formed, then Eve" showing that he was referring to literal people, the temptation of Eve is mentioned in 1 Tim 2:14 and 2 Cor 11:3 and in both cases described as literal events..

It is not written in a poetic/ allegorical style as some claim. The style of Genesis is NOT consistent with Psalms or Proverbs which are both examples of Hebrew poetry, Genesis 2 is part of the creation record and not poetic, the creation element of Genesis has a straightforward historical narrative similar to any other OT historical narrative i.e. using "this is the account of....", NT writers refer to creation events as historical.

I don't know why it's so difficult to grasp that a piece of literature can be poetic in nature and still be describing actual historic events.

The Genesis account of creation is not giving us a literal scientific account, it is a prime example of an Ancient-Near-Eastern Suzerain-Vassal treaty, a covenant, with its introduction of a Great King, the prologue, blessings curses etc. It is clearly a document of its time, it is not a newspaper report, it is not an abstract from a scientific paper. This irrational fear of non-literal language (unless it has a 20 foot sign in neon above it screaming "THIS IS A PARABLE!!") simply betrays how engrained the post-enlightenment modernist way of reading a text is engrained in Christian thinking today. There is a kind of slavery to the thinking that only rationalistic scientific truth can be taken seriously and other forms are lesser so. Unless we try to understand the scriptures as it was intended to be understood by it's first hearers, then we are allowing our own cultural bias to influence our understanding rather than the original intent of the author.

I also suggest you look up Meredith Kline's Framework hypothesis, a work which truly seeks to put the creation account into its cultural context rather than forcing our own onto it.

And how anyone can say that Gen 1 is not like the poetry in the Psalms with its repetition and mirroring of words and phrases is baffling. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it so.

 

[theFijian]

I am currently reading Genesis, but it is not something I can take literally I'm afraid.

What do you mean by "take literally"?

 

[ConfuseddotCom]

What do you mean by "take literally"?

I mean just as I said

 

[theFijian]

I mean just as I said

Right, just so you know, something can be true and not be literally true, ie. a metaphor.

 

[lismore]

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