Here’s the core issue I hear underneath your words: you’re convinced that anyone who reads Genesis 1 as anything other than stylised theological poetry is automatically “making stuff up wholesale.”
Not "automatically", just when they're stuck for an answer, and then they'll make stuff up that Scriptureri doesn't say at all. TYpicall it involves "light sources" or "suns" that SCripture doesn't mention in any way. It's patently dishonest, but needs must when you doctrine is in the ditch, right?
Conversely, I’m convinced that anyone who insists the text MUST be pure symbolism is also deciding in advance what God could or couldn’t have meant.
I assume that God didn't literally
mean anything that doesn't make sense, like evening and mornings without a sun to produce them. And apparently Genesis literalists often agree with me, given the frequency with which they find it necessary to make up stuff from whole cloth to "support" the idea that every word in Genesis must be literally true. The whole "light source" nonsense is the prime example.
Both of us are bringing a hermeneutic—a set of lenses—to the page.
That is true. I believe that the testimony of God's Creation itself is the best source of information for Creation itself. Genesis, not so much. Genesis was composed to convey the essence of the Creation to people who had no understanding of the nature of the cosmos
at all. They reckoned time in evenings and mornings, moons, and seasons. Twenry four "hour" days? What's an hour? "Oh, it's a 24th of a day." "....oh... OK".
So how long did it take for God to make everything? Oh, six epochs. "What's an epoch. ? 150 zillion years" "what's a year? " "two seasons". "How many seasons in an epoch""? Three hundred zillion. "Is that more than 100? Yeah, by a fair bit. "
OK, lets think of it this way. God made everything in Six days, one evening and one morning eash". Oh, then why didn'tyou say that in the first place!"
That's rhe principle. You have to meet your students where they are, even today. And you don't go looking for the principles of particle physics in a 6th grade science book. And that wasn't what Genesis was about in the first place. It was about "God made the universe", and the details were scarce, to no one's surprise.
That'd the summary of my position.
The only honest question is: which lenses are prescribed by the text itself, and which are simply fashionable in our own century?
Bother fashion. Either such data as that is there is there is factual or it it isn't. In short, almost none of it is. THe best you can wring out of it is "God made everything", which is what it says in John 1 in concise form.
If “evening + morning + number” is obviously metaphor, why does every other biblical author who quotes the passage treat it as the ground for Israel’s seven-day week?
Because from a religious/ceremonial standpoint the six day week plus Sabbath is representative of God's Creation. Inaccurate? Sure, but it isn't about empirical data. It's about God and His Creation.
If the sun is required before the word “day” can be used, why do we still speak of a “three-day journey” when clouds hide the sun for a week?
Because a "day" our vernacular is 24 hours, one revolution of the earth. Both of those were concepts unknown and unknowable to those to whom Genesis was recited (recitation being the way stories were shared in those days, after all). So an evening and a morning was a day, because it is. No hours, minutes, seconds, microseconds, nanoseconds, ad infinitum. And if you're dealing with a figurative day, it's an evening and a morning. Even if there's no sun. Or fictitious sun-substitute. (BTW why do you reckon God stuck in a temporary sun on Day 1 instead of just installing the permanent sun right off the bat? That's what I'd have done, but then I never designed a universe.)
If Genesis is only theological poetry, why does John 1 anchor the physical origin of “all things” to that same historical Word who “became flesh” in Roman-occupied Judea?
Lost me there, mate.
You call that “add-on rubbish”; I call it letting Scripture interpret Scripture
I don't see any evidence that you've done any such thing. Instead you've pencil -whipped and "interpreted" into submission any Scripture that didn't fit your presuppositions Better described as "doctrine interpreting Scripture.)
—something the Reformation labelled Sola Scriptura, not Sola 21st-Century Scientia.
'Splain to me how SS it is to run in new "suns" into a the Creation account where there is not even even a vague hint of such a thing having happened. "Sola doctrinal necessity " would be more accurate.
we may discover that the God who made the cosmos in six literal days is equally able to sustain it for six billion years.
Nice try, but you're still pointedly ignoring both Moses' St. Peter's teaching about God's reckoning of time, which renders the entire "Six Solar Day Creation" doctrine utterly ridiculous. And no, "but that doesn't count!" doesn't do you any good. Either the old Prophet and the old Saint just got it wrong, or y'all did. I'm putting my money on them getting it right.
—and that His real concern is whether we will rest in the Seventh-Day Man, Jesus, who finished the work we could never clock in on.
Nice religious jargon there. I'm sure it's translatable to English, but I'm not the man for the job.
the humble question is not “How long?” but “Will we let that Word have the final say over our theories and timelines?”
My question is how long will yourDid ou lot drive reasonable people away from the Christian Faith by peddling baseless Fundy dogmas as essential confessions of faith? Did any of the disciples go to unbelievers and "preach unto them Genesis"?
Do the Creeds we confess mention belief in a 6 Day Creation? Did the Council of Jerusalem require the Gentile converts to profess belief in the literal truth of Genesis 1? Did our Lord say "he that believeth in Me, and who believes in a literal Six Day Creation, though he were dead, yet shall he live"? No, none of the above.
No, a belief in the literal truth of the Genesis account of the Creation has
never been a requirement of the Church. If you folks require to qualify as a member of your sect that is entirely your business. But it is not a requirement of the Church of Christ, and never has been. You're free to believe it, and we're free not to believe it. If you'd rather not consider us Christians on that basis that's entirely your own affair.
