If there are any on here, how do you explain Exodus, Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, Jude and others seemingly referring to these passages as literal?
If there are any on here, how do you explain Exodus, Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, Jude and others seemingly referring to these passages as literal?
If there are any on here, how do you explain Exodus, Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, Jude and others seemingly referring to these passages as literal?
I have discussions with people about Genesis and talk about creation as being six days. The apostles likely held to it as being six days, I don't know. But I don't think it was six literal days and honestly I don't think it matters.
I think it matters as to a literal bible. If He said days, then He meant days. You can't say 'a day equals 24 hours in every verse of the Bible, accept genesis." That's weird.
that is just in the case of interpretation of prophecy, again to say every time someone says day in scripture is to mean a thousand years. For one, why not just say a thousand years to begin with, why say a 'day equals a thousand years." Unless you were hiding something, and that I think is the key. Some prophecy actually proves scripture logically speaking. God sometimes Hides himself from people. Parables are an example of this. He gave the interpretation to His disciples alone, not the masses Secondly to say a day is a thousand years universally is confusing and not straightforward and violates basic hermeneutics.But then 2 Peter has it that a thousand years is as a day. So I suppose that we could say that it was six though years. Or we could say that it doesn't matter.
In any case it isn't an article of faith.
What is an allegory:If there are any on here, how do you explain Exodus, Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, Jude and others seemingly referring to these passages as literal?
Hermeneutics takes into account the culture of a people.that is just in the case of interpretation of prophecy, again to say every time someone says day in scripture is to mean a thousand years. For one, why not just say a thousand years to begin with, why say a 'day equals a thousand years." Unless you were hiding something, and that I think is the key. Some prophecy actually proves scripture logically speaking. God sometimes Hides himself from people. Parables are an example of this. He gave the interpretation to His disciples alone, not the masses Secondly to say a day is a thousand years universally is confusing and not straightforward and violates basic hermeneutics.
While I don't classify the earliest chapters of Genesis as "allegory" per say, I do think they served as a polemic of sorts against the backward pagan cosmogonies of surrounding cultures. Furthermore, here's what I said on another thread last year, so I'll just say it again here:If there are any on here, how do you explain Exodus, Jesus, Paul, Peter, James, Jude and others seemingly referring to these passages as literal?
What is an allegory:
Allegory Definition
Allegory is a figure of speech in which abstract ideas and principles are described in terms of characters, figures, and events. It can be employed in prose and poetry to tell a story, with a purpose of teaching or explaining an idea or a principle. The objective of its use is to teach some kind of a moral lesson.
What is an analogy:
Analogy Definition
An analogy is a comparison in which an idea or a thing is compared to another thing that is quite different from it. It aims at explaining that idea or thing by comparing it to something that is familiar. Metaphors and similes are tools used to draw an analogy.
I believe Genesis could be called an allegory or an analogy.
Because one believes that it is not literal in every way (for instance, I don't think snakes ever spoke) it does not mean that what it is teaching is not true.
God certainly created the universe,, He certainly created the first man and woman.
We don't know exactly how and we don't know how long it took.
But we also can know that Genesis is true to what it teaches about God and His creation.
Hermeneutics takes into account the culture of a people.
We know that the earth was not created in 6 days.
While I don't classify the earliest chapters of Genesis as "allegory" per say, I do think they served as a polemic of sorts against the backward pagan cosmogonies of surrounding cultures. Furthermore, here's what I said on another thread last year, so I'll just say it again here:
Of course the peoples of the past, including the Israelite/Jewish people, thought and worked within different paradigmatic conceptions than we do today, and those conceptions acted as a foil by which to articulate their perceptions of God and of events in the world of that time. But that paradigmatic foil doesn't have to be understood by us as being prescriptive of 'how' we have to physically conceive of the world. Rather, it should be seen as merely descriptive in nature and reflective of the times in which it was written and in which God permitted the folks of that ancient era to express themselves, expression that came without a prescription for how we 'have' to understand the nature of the world.
What do I, as a Theo-Evo, think this means in practical terms for us today? It means that when we're dealing with texts that are as ancient as is Genesis, we understand that the writer(s) saw the world as an upside down 'bowl' of sorts rather than as a round physical planet orbiting a sun. It also means that Adam and Eve generally represent humanity on the whole, the Tree of Life symbolizes God's intended provision of ongoing life for humanity, the Serpent represents spiritually dark influences (and maybe entities), and the Garden itself represents God's intended blessings in an abundant environment.
Let's face it; the revelatory inspiration of the earliest chapters of the Bible doesn't have to be de facto history in literal entities for Chapter 3 to have meaning for us and confer to us some understanding of God's view on things, especially at a much earlier stage of humanities cognition of the world around them.
[See the book, Genesis: History, Fiction, Or Neither? : Three Views on the Bible's Earliest Chapters, by Zondervan, Charles Halton, et al., (2015)]
again you guys, if you can allow allegory in basic words like 'day' what is to keep us from allegorizing things that are not as tanegable like 'heaven.' for example. you can't simply pick and choose what is allegorical simply because it does not match the scientific consensus for example.
if you can allow allegory in basic words like 'day'
again let me repeat, if we can allegorize basic every day words like 'day' what is to keep someone from allegorizing not so common words, like 'heaven.' or 'salvation' ?Understanding the principle of 'genre distinction' will keep us from making wholesale errors in our interpretations of our common scripture.
If we know that we as Christians need to handle our sacred scriptures carefully when interpreting, and one of the issues inherent to our collections of texts is that they are of different genres of writing, then we also know that just because we might interpret some idea in one place of the Bible doesn't automatically mean we'll just do likewise throughout the rest of the Bible. No, we're going to have to do the hard work of hermeneutics and discern various meanings for different ideas where they show up in the texts...and don't jump to any associated conclusions just because something in another part of the Bible seems to be 'the same.' It might be; and it might not be.
Moreover, each of us will have to attempt to understand the Bible as best we can from our own day and time...
again let me repeat, if we can allegorize basic every day words like 'day' what is to keep someone from allegorizing not so common words, like 'heaven.' or 'salvation' ?
That's actually a typical talking point from atheists. Usually the example would (most often) be the Flood story. Let's look at that for a moment.how every part of these chapters has a parallel in Babylonian myth
Why would anyone have told the NT writers that? Luke, who was the most explicit about how he wrote, claimed to have investigated carefully, talking to people who had seen Jesus or talked to those who had. He never claimed that God told him what to write personally.However, my problem is that no one seems to have told the New Testament writers that. How am I to make sense of God's word if God's word has such discrepancies?
What is an allegory:
Allegory Definition
Allegory is a figure of speech in which abstract ideas and principles are described in terms of characters, figures, and events. It can be employed in prose and poetry to tell a story, with a purpose of teaching or explaining an idea or a principle. The objective of its use is to teach some kind of a moral lesson.
What is an analogy:
Analogy Definition
An analogy is a comparison in which an idea or a thing is compared to another thing that is quite different from it. It aims at explaining that idea or thing by comparing it to something that is familiar. Metaphors and similes are tools used to draw an analogy.
I believe Genesis could be called an allegory or an analogy.
Because one believes that it is not literal in every way (for instance, I don't think snakes ever spoke) it does not mean that what it is teaching is not true.
God certainly created the universe,, He certainly created the first man and woman.
We don't know exactly how and we don't know how long it took.
But we also can know that Genesis is true to what it teaches about God and His creation.
so again if 'days' which is a common every day word in the scriptures, can be taken metaphorically, what is to keep someone from saying 'heaven' or 'salvation' is a metaphor?When we stop reading the Bible as dictated word by word from the viewpoint of God and will begin to read it as a witnessing of human authors and their experiences a and inspirations from God, it will begin to make better sense.
Its neither literal, nor allegory. Gen 1 - 11 are so many chapters that there will be all kinds of genres in it, both literal and metaphorical.