Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
... no, I didn't say that an evolutionary understanding of the world requires any of us to "throw out much of the bible." What I said was that if Genesis 3 is representational/metaphorical, then it's full meaning is hedged from us, but we can still glean the essential spiritual meaning, EVEN IF it isn't literal history.
Thus, we can know from a metaphorical reading of Genesis 3 that humanity (from God's point of view) is fallen and separated from Him. Do we 'know' when this took place? No. Do we 'know' exactly how sin infests our physical and mental being? No. But what we do know is that the bible is God's revelation to humanity, even if some of it is hedged in mystery, particularly Genesis 1 thru 3 (and maybe through ch. 11, at the least).
And that's all I'm actually saying. Try not to read more into what I'm saying than what I'm actually saying since I'm not attempting to be metaphorical here, brother -57.
At some point the parental ancestors of all living humans committed an act of sin/disobedience against God. And all humanity was directly negatively affected by that act. That was literal fact. Some of the language and figures used in the story were symbolic or figurative.
Okay. I'll play.
I am merely suggesting the contrast between Genesis being just a fable and Genesis being a revelation from God to Moses. All I was saying was, what if...?
My guess there would be no God as well with your line of questioning. The whole reason we exist is for God's pleasure. We are made in His image. The animals, insects and plants were not. Lets just say He does exist and He really did create Eden for them to live in, then I would say God also gave them free will with only one potential for sinning and they sinned. The rest is God's grace.
Our bodies enjoyed the immortality of our souls. A consequence of the fall was that our bodies die and now want to survive.
Jesus identified these parental ancestors as "Adam" and "Eve" who lived in the Garden of Eden. Eden was a definite known geographical location before the Flood which changed the whole geography of the region.
The Garden of Eden is God's rest, righteousness. The Garden story is the 2nd creation story. God's children have 2 creations. We are born into this world and then created anew into righteousness or God's rest. Man cannot achieve righteousness through his own efforts but must depend on God to grant him this through faith.
One definition of sin is disobeying a written commandment. Another type of sin is not knowing to do right in the absence of proper written commandments, resulting in sin and loss.
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.
I'm sure Paul, as a devout believer and without the science to know otherwise, likely trusted that the earliest chapters of the Bible were more descriptive of exacting details of God's Creation along with the Fall than I do. But the fact that Paul had this understanding doesn't in and of itself imply that he was wrong about events and reports surrounding the truth of Christ. Furthermore, it could also be made out that Paul's main focus when writing to Timothy was to straighten out some ongoing issues within the church of that area that are not explained in detail by him [like the presence in the church of uppity men and women who wanted to use alternative myths and texts to challenge male authority] rather than being simply a set of comments by which to explain the Fall and its effects. [See the book by Kroeger & Kroeger titled, I Suffer Not A Woman: Rethinking 1 Timothy 2:11-15 in the Light of Ancient Evidence (1998).]
Because we're sinners. We aren't guilty of Adam's sins, we're guilty of our own.
"Mankind" doesn't sin, you and I do.
Irrelevant.
"Mankind".whoever that is, was never "thrust into sin". Sin is voluntary or it's not sin, and it's individuals who are guilty of it.
if Gen 3 is some sort of abstraction then the crux of the text still shows us that man is fallen and all the products of fallen man still remain the same.
