Does age matter....

Sketcher

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Would it change your Christianity if you changed your opinion of the age of the earth?
No it would not. God still created it. People still sinned. Jesus still came, died, and rose from the grave.
 
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Tellyontellyon

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Perhaps the issue is to do with how literally do we read the Bible? The bible does contain historical facts, but it also contains illustrations, metaphor and parables... Inspiring stories, etc.
The trouble comes when that gets mixed up... and it's not always obvious when they are mixed up.

One person's reply was that they err on the side of caution by assuming a literal stance, most of the time...
.... but why is that safer than assuming a metaphorical stance...
..... Better to consider both stances, and not take an outright position, seems safer to me...imo.

(To the person who said I follow a false religion... That's from the Christian pov, from a Buddhist pov, it's not false. It's just that we have different beliefs. I'm really not here to argue that I'm right and that you are wrong.. you might be right!
From a Buddhist pov, so long as you are not hurting people, you are developing compassion, that you are humble and selfless, then you are not so very far from Buddhism... Even though you might think I'm going to hell. I'm sure if you practice your religion well, you will indeed go to heaven.... I suspect my greed will send me to the hungry ghost realm )
 
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JIMINZ

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Perhaps the issue is to do with how literally do we read the Bible? The bible does contain historical facts, but it also contains illustrations, metaphor and parables... Inspiring stories, etc.
The trouble comes when that gets mixed up... and it's not always obvious when they are mixed up.

One person's reply was that they err on the side of caution by assuming a literal stance, most of the time...
.... but why is that safer than assuming a metaphorical stance...
..... Better to consider both stances, and not take an outright position, seems safer to me...imo.

(To the person who said I follow a false religion... That's from the Christian pov, from a Buddhist pov, it's not false. It's just that we have different beliefs. I'm really not here to argue that I'm right and that you are wrong.. you might be right!
From a Buddhist pov, so long as you are not hurting people, you are developing compassion, that you are humble and selfless, then you are not so very far from Buddhism... Even though you might think I'm going to hell. I'm sure if you practice your religion well, you will indeed go to heaven.... I suspect my greed will send me to the hungry ghost realm )

It has nothing at all to do with your compassion, it only has to do with your Belief in Christ as Savior.

That is what makes every other Religion false in the eyes of God.


Act 4:11,12
11. This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, which is become the head of the corner.
12. Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.
 
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ViaCrucis

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The scientists say that the world is far far older than could ever be the case from a literal reading of the Bible....
On the other hand, God can do anything he likes and make things appear as he wishes, for his own mysterious reasons.

Christians I've met seem to have a range of views as to the age of the earth. Some say thousands, some say hundreds of billions...

✝️ But does it really matter from a Christian point of view?
Would it change your Christianity if you changed your opinion of the age of the earth?

There is no biblical or Christian position concerning the age of the earth or the universe. The 6,000 years figure doesn't come from the Bible, or even really from Christian tradition, but rather the calculations done by an Anglican clergyman by the name of James Ussher in the 17th century.

Some Christians have, historically, thought that the 7 days of the creation week were symbolic, and pointed toward a 7,000 period of history; six thousand years for history and the seventh day being symbolically as the period of rest after the conclusion of history. This stems from some earlier Jewish views that were present during the 2nd Temple Period and in later Rabbinic Jewish traditions. But in the estimation of some early thinkers, the time of the 7th millennium is already. See Six Ages of the World - Wikipedia

But this has to do with an allegorical, rather than literal, reading of Genesis 1.

In the 18th and 19th centuries most Christians, or at least educated Christians, were already aware of the findings of geologists, and so an older earth was already established in Christian thought. That the earth may have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years old based on geological study (this is well before Darwin).

In fact, in the 19th and early 20th centuries most of the religious opponents of Darwinism were Old Earth Creationists--Christians who accepted that the earth was very old (at least millions of years old). We don't see Young Earth Creationism really showing up as an organized movement among conservative Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians until the mid-20th century, with the publication of works such as the Genesis Flood (1961).

I only bring this up in order to help contextualize this discussion historically.

-CryptoLutheran
 
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ViaCrucis

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Perhaps the issue is to do with how literally do we read the Bible? The bible does contain historical facts, but it also contains illustrations, metaphor and parables... Inspiring stories, etc.
The trouble comes when that gets mixed up... and it's not always obvious when they are mixed up.

One person's reply was that they err on the side of caution by assuming a literal stance, most of the time...
.... but why is that safer than assuming a metaphorical stance...
..... Better to consider both stances, and not take an outright position, seems safer to me...imo.

(To the person who said I follow a false religion... That's from the Christian pov, from a Buddhist pov, it's not false. It's just that we have different beliefs. I'm really not here to argue that I'm right and that you are wrong.. you might be right!
From a Buddhist pov, so long as you are not hurting people, you are developing compassion, that you are humble and selfless, then you are not so very far from Buddhism... Even though you might think I'm going to hell. I'm sure if you practice your religion well, you will indeed go to heaven.... I suspect my greed will send me to the hungry ghost realm )

Nobody takes all of the Bible literally, or all of it allegorically, or, etc.

Everyone recognizes that some things are literal, some things are figurative, etc. It's that there isn't always uniform agreement on when to do which.

The Bible isn't always obvious. And that's okay. It's okay to not understand something in the Bible. In fact I'd argue that it is better to say "I don't know" rather than try and engage in some kind of speculative dogmatics.

This also requires that we allow ourselves to be humble enough to say "I don't know", and to learn to be okay with somethings being unknown and confusing. It's okay to be perplexed. It's okay to not have all the answers. It's okay if not everything seems to fit together all neat and tidy.

What matters about the Bible is Jesus.

-CryptoLutheran
 
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ChetSinger

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The scientists say that the world is far far older than could ever be the case from a literal reading of the Bible....
On the other hand, God can do anything he likes and make things appear as he wishes, for his own mysterious reasons.

Christians I've met seem to have a range of views as to the age of the earth. Some say thousands, some say hundreds of billions...

✝️ But does it really matter from a Christian point of view?
Would it change your Christianity if you changed your opinion of the age of the earth?
I've moved among multiple opinions over the course of my life. For a while I was a YEC, but I now see things in the first six days that just don't seem to fit in with that. One example is the evenings and mornings before the sun was created. Another is the symmetry of the passage, where God creates empty spaces on the first three days and then populates them, in the same order, on the final three days.

Currently, I'm confident that God has created everything, and that a deep understanding of the six days of Genesis 1 is beyond me. I'm content if he did it in six 24-hour days, and also content if he did it differently.
 
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andreha

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Nope. It really doesn't matter but I err on the side of caution and take a literal approach to the Bible when it comes to things that are debatable so to speak.

I do agree with this view.
 
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Silly Uncle Wayne

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The scientists say that the world is far far older than could ever be the case from a literal reading of the Bible....
On the other hand, God can do anything he likes and make things appear as he wishes, for his own mysterious reasons.

Christians I've met seem to have a range of views as to the age of the earth. Some say thousands, some say hundreds of billions...

✝️ But does it really matter from a Christian point of view?
Would it change your Christianity if you changed your opinion of the age of the earth?
It didn't change my views as I changed from young Earth to Old Earth.

The principle problem with 'literal' calculations of the age of the Earth is that that is not how the ancients recorded things so 'begat' can mean a literal 'was the father of' but can also mean 'was the ancestor of'.

The age of the Earth is not a concern of the Bible.
 
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coffee4u

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The scientists say that the world is far far older than could ever be the case from a literal reading of the Bible....
On the other hand, God can do anything he likes and make things appear as he wishes, for his own mysterious reasons.

Christians I've met seem to have a range of views as to the age of the earth. Some say thousands, some say hundreds of billions...

✝️ But does it really matter from a Christian point of view?
Would it change your Christianity if you changed your opinion of the age of the earth?

What people get side tracked into is thinking how God made the world and how quickly is the issue, it is not. The issue is sin, how sin came to be and death, how death came to be.
The reason I believe in a literal Genesis account and that the world is young is due to this scripture.
Romans 5:12
Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—


The Bible says that death is linked directly to sin.
Sin entered the world through Adam, before he sinned there was no sin and there was no
death.

One thing that is certain with belief in millions of years is that death would have occurred as a natural part of life for the millions of years it would have taken.
How would no death before sin fit into that world view?

If nothing died for millions of years the world would not even fit all the creatures upon it and how would all the carnivorousness animals eat?
The only way for it to be possible for there to be no death before sin is because creation occurred and then sin soon after.

So I can never change my position on the age of the world. It's quite possible that God being the creator of the world and outside of time (he created time for us) that peoples attempts at dating things have no base in reality because they are not reflecting true ages at all. It could be reflecting back time bending at certain points like creation or the fall giving the appearance of something that is in fact not actually there.
The one thing I am sure on is God's word. He alone is infallible and mankind, no matter how smart, is not. So if mankind disagrees with God's word I choose to believe God.
 
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OldWiseGuy

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That the earth is literally filled with the fossils of dead animals indicates that death existed long before Adam. Romans 5:12 says death entered the human family through Adam, not that Adam was the first to sin. The angels were the first to sin, not Adam.
2 Peter 2:4
Jude 1:6
 
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mama2one

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Would it change your Christianity if you changed your opinion of the age of the earth?

well, "Bernie" you're only as old as you feel

imagine the earth is feeling pretty old now with increasing temps, drought here, fires there, and way too much trash

maybe we all need to pitch in to make earth younger again?
 
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