For those who hold an Allegorical view of Genesis 1-11...

aspie3000 · Apr 27, 2020

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?

HTacianas · Apr 27, 2020

aspie3000 said:
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.

createdtoworship · Apr 27, 2020

aspie3000 said:
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?

HTacianas said:
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.

HTacianas · Apr 27, 2020

createdtoworship said:
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.

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.

createdtoworship · Apr 27, 2020

HTacianas said:
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.

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.

GodsGrace101 · Apr 27, 2020

aspie3000 said:
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.

GodsGrace101 · Apr 27, 2020

createdtoworship said:
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.

Hermeneutics takes into account the culture of a people.

We know that the earth was not created in 6 days.

2PhiloVoid · Apr 27, 2020

aspie3000 said:
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?

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)]

createdtoworship · Apr 27, 2020

GodsGrace101 said:
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.

GodsGrace101 said:
Hermeneutics takes into account the culture of a people.

We know that the earth was not created in 6 days.

2PhiloVoid said:
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. The majority of scientists don't believe in God does that mean we should allegorize every word 'God' in scripture as some buzzing force in the universe?

2PhiloVoid · Apr 27, 2020

createdtoworship said:
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.

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...

hedrick · Apr 27, 2020

The creation stories aren't allegories. That's a specific literary form, and they don't have that feature. I'd call them legends or maybe myths.

As to NT references, they were stories that everyone knew. In middle school Sunday School I'll refer to Harry Potter. Previous generations could have used characters in Shakespeare.

In fact I doubt that 1st Cent Jews really considered whether the stories were literally true or not. Perhaps God should have revealed modern literary criticism to 1st Cent Jews, or astronomy and physics to the authors of Genesis. But there were plenty of things we know now that they didn't know. For some reason he chose to let us develop most knowledge on our own, and focused on specific matters having to do with our relationship to him and to each other.

Halbhh · Apr 27, 2020

createdtoworship said:
if you can allow allegory in basic words like 'day'

This reminded me of a natural trap these discussions always run into -- we can easily get misled into an argument about viewpoints that has no good in it, and that often happens.

There's a profound problem in any of us insisting it's all literal or all figurative, etc.

Or all this way, or all that way.

For example: if someone tries assert Genesis is "literal only", then right off we can see that's not true --

"...but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (verse 2:17, ESV)

If we believe that Adam lived instead of dying that day. Literally. Literally Adam did not die that day....

But Adam did die that day -- figuratively, allegorically.

(but the text doesn't exist merely for us to argue about it!!)

If we get caught up in trying to defend a mere viewpoint, we are missing the real meaning and intent and.........the value, the treasure.

Something so much better is available than viewpoints and theories like YEC and every other viewpoint also.

What we all each need to do is lay aside trying to be the Teacher towards the scripture (avoid that mistake), and instead to be the student towards the scripture: to be the one who is listening.

We want to fall silent with our doctrines, ideas, etc., and just truly listen, in order to hear.

We want to be the ones that hear, instead of talking over the Word. That way, with real listening, we can get the profound treasures that await us!

For example, with real listening, we can be changed by chapter 1. That's why this chapter exists. To change us. We need to fall silent at times, and totally listen, expecting to be the ones that are being taught. Only that attitude, alone, is sufficient. We are not God, but He is instead. That means instead of us teaching the words, He is. So, we fall silent in our minds and truly listen, in order to hear. This is true in chapter 1, and it is true in chapter 2, and it is true in chapter 3 -- we are to listen.

createdtoworship · Apr 27, 2020

2PhiloVoid said:
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' ?

2PhiloVoid · Apr 27, 2020

createdtoworship said:
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' ?

First off, I'm not a big supporter of seeing things in the bible as 'allegory.' Secondly, if there are allegories at all in the Bible, then they come in the form of narrative segments and with this being the case, then our recognition of this wouldn't automatically become one by which we easily transfer the same kind of approach to our understanding of single concepts which we also extract from the Bible. No, language and culture, especially that of ancient Israelites/Jewish people, is too complex to just think we can find one principle and automatically just throw it around like a common currency.

So, I'm afraid we'll just have to remind ourselves that we will all have to continuously [cyclically] do the hard work of hermeneutics in order to exegete our sacred scriptures, even chapter by chapter, book by book. So, don't worry about it too much, bro!

I mean, there's a reason Paul told Timothy to "study to show yourself as approved ..."

aspie3000 · Apr 27, 2020

See, I've asked this question because things aren't making sense. On one hand, I know that that the God of the Bible and his son Jesus exist and are great because he's spoken to me at least twice in my life clearly. However, Genesis 1-11 seems clearly to be metaphorical and polemical in nature especially considering how every part of these chapters has a parallel in Babylonian myth but the concepts expressed within go against those myths and put forth the Israelite/God's view.

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?

I don't like the answer of "Well they're ancient people and ancient people didn't know a lot". No these people were speaking under the influence of the Holy Spirit and some of their references to the old testament wouldn't make a lot of sense unless there was a historical event behind them.

solid_core · Apr 27, 2020

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.

Halbhh · Apr 27, 2020

aspie3000 said:
how every part of these chapters has a parallel in Babylonian myth

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.

Consider if there was a gigantic fire in the ancient past, pre history for most nations, after period of much lush growth so that much forest and undergrowth and brush and grasslands were everywhere across all lands. A great fire that swept all the known world, and all known distant lands too. A result would be that many centuries or even millennia later, there would be stories in various cultures about the Great Fire.

Would one conclude then from the varieties of 'myths' about the Great Fire, elaborated in various ways, often with some common elements, that such a great sweeping fire was only an invented myth, and never happened?

Well, no, the very fact of a variety of stories with some commonalities would immediately suggest instead that indeed something real did happen.

hedrick · Apr 27, 2020

aspie3000 said:
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?

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.

aspie3000 · Apr 27, 2020

GodsGrace101 said:
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.

Right, cool. I get that. The question though is why the rest of the Bible refers to this stuff literally or seemingly does. I haven't got a satisfying answer from anyone regarding this yet. It must have to do with the culture of 1st century Jews or the ancient world but no one has informed of this cultural feature yet.

createdtoworship · Apr 27, 2020

solid_core said:
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.

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?

For those who hold an Allegorical view of Genesis 1-11...

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