Genesis and the Fall

[Daniel9v9]

What about the talking snake.....and later in the OT, the talking donkey?

There's a lot that can be said about this, but I think it would be more fruitful to address what I think is the root of the issue, which has to do with God's omnipotence and understanding the extent of it.

God is all-powerful. He made the whole universe and everything in it. He is not bound by the laws of nature, for He created it and is above it. If God wants to use a donkey as a messenger, He can quite simply change the laws of nature to make it happen. This is well within God's power, and this is what all miracles are - namely, God's divine intervention, which is not subject to natural law. Just as Christ was raised from the dead, in like manner, a donkey spoke. These were not ordinary events and are not possible within the realm of natural law, but they are possible in the realm of God's power.

Satan is also powerful, but he is not all-powerful. He can either possess or come in the form of a created being, which is an abuse of his power.

In either case, there is no difficulty given the subjects involved. It only becomes a problem if you take God out of the equation. Very simply: Is the miracle recorded for us in the Bible? If yes: Can God do it? The answer to this question is always yes.

Speaking of creation of man and woman, what do you believe about evolution and the bones and fossils found, that point in that direction?

How does hard science not disprove Genesis when there is so much found that points toward evolution as opposed to the Biblical explanation of how people came to be?

Well, this is a big subject, and we've talked about this already in a few other threads. Here I summarise how Macro Evolution is not factual hard science, but a theoretical science:
Lutheran POV

Macro Evolution does not disprove Genesis. It's a competing idea. It's a theory built upon several assumptions and underlying philosophical notions. It's a position that cannot be proven, so it remains a worldview or a belief system.

 

[FaithT]

There's a lot that can be said about this, but I think it would be more fruitful to address what I think is the root of the issue, which has to do with God's omnipotence and understanding the extent of it.

God is all-powerful. He made the whole universe and everything in it. He is not bound by the laws of nature, for He created it and is above it. If God wants to use a donkey as a messenger, He can quite simply change the laws of nature to make it happen. This is well within God's power, and this is what all miracles are - namely, God's divine intervention, which is not subject to natural law. Just as Christ was raised from the dead, in like manner, a donkey spoke. These were not ordinary events and are not possible within the realm of natural law, but they are possible in the realm of God's power.

Satan is also powerful, but he is not all-powerful. He can either possess or come in the form of a created being, which is an abuse of his power.

In either case, there is no difficulty given the subjects involved. It only becomes a problem if you take God out of the equation. Very simply: Is the miracle recorded for us in the Bible? If yes: Can God do it? The answer to this question is always yes.




Well, this is a big subject, and we've talked about this already in a few other threads. Here I summarise how Macro Evolution is not factual hard science, but a theoretical science:
Lutheran POV

Macro Evolution does not disprove Genesis. It's a competing idea. It's a theory built upon several assumptions and underlying philosophical notions. It's a position that cannot be proven, so it remains a worldview or a belief system.

Thanks you’ve been a great help.

 

[9Rock9]

I think the most important thing to accept is that Adam and Eve really sinned.

It's commonly asserted that all people are descended from Adam and Even, and thus, we have inherited their sinful nature.

There's also the federal headship view which asserts that there were other humans besides them, but Adam and Eve were the representative heads of the human race, so the entire race got collectively punished.

As long as you believe that sin entered the world as a result of human disobedience, then I think otherwise non-literal interpretations are fine.

 

[Roymond]

My pastor replied but didn’t actually answer my question which was can you still be LCMS if you interpret the talking snake as figurative. He said something like,
“The difficulty is that if you take all of the supernatural things in the Bible as figurative, you‘ve just eliminated the resurrection.
The snake is no different than the resurrection… they are all things that cannot be explained by natural science.”

I just replied and asked if while I’m struggling with this can I still be LCMS?

Yes, you can still be LCMS, though probably not consecrated as a deaconess or anything!

BTW, your pastor is missing something: the difficulty actually lies in understanding what kind of literature any given part of scripture is meant to be. Fundamentalists today treat the scriptures as though they were our great-grandfather's diary of events, but that has never been a dogma of the church, and when applied to ancient literature is a good way to make mistakes!
When it comes to the Genesis 3 account of the Fall, it's a type of literature we don't have, a sort of history but told with mythic elements. That shows up in the curse against the serpent: he is cursed to do what snakes do anyway, i.e. slither on their bellies, which makes no sense if taken literally but makes awesome sense if seen as a manifestation in Creation of a loss of glory that the particular serpent in the Garden experienced as a result of God's judgment: no more would any serpent get to talk, but instead would "eat dust". So the serpent is both a serpent and the Adversary, and the curse uses the ordinary behavior of snakes to illustrate God's punishment of the Adversary.
So in a way your pastor is right because the snake isn't figurative, it's mythical (which doesn't mean the common idea of "fiction", but a thing with more meaning than it would have all by itself). But he's also wrong because in some kinds of literature items such as the snake can be taken figuratively and that won't affect the Resurrection one bit, because the Resurrection is reported as a historical event that anyone who had been present would have observed.

Which reminds me: Lutherans, like the Orthodox and Catholics, don't believe the Resurrection because the scriptures tell us it happened, we believe the scriptures because they tell us about the Resurrection that the early Christians witnessed! The Resurrection is that fact that makes the scriptures mean anything at all, not the other way around [you know that little song with the line "... this I know, because the Bible tells me so?" That song is actually wrong -- we believe because the Holy Spirit has "called us by the Gospel", and the Gospel tells us that Jesus rose from the dead , and because He did then we believe the scriptures!

 

[Roymond]

I think the most important thing to accept is that Adam and Eve really sinned.

It's commonly asserted that all people are descended from Adam and Even, and thus, we have inherited their sinful nature.

There's also the federal headship view which asserts that there were other humans besides them, but Adam and Eve were the representative heads of the human race, so the entire race got collectively punished.

As long as you believe that sin entered the world as a result of human disobedience, then I think otherwise non-literal interpretations are fine.

My current personal view is that in Genesis 1 God created humans that were part of the animal kingdom, and in Genesis 2 we have the account of a very special, very personal of the first humans who were "living souls" -- and when those two got sent out, their children took mates from the other humans and their descendants became living souls as well. It treats Genesis 2 as literal without saying anything about Genesis 1.