If Genesis 3 is a metaphor...

2PhiloVoid said:

... 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.

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Then how can you say that the story of Christ's death and resurrection isn't simply a spiritual/metaphorical lesson? What do you actually accept in the Bible as true events?

That goes without saying. We can make choices but have no choice about the outcome.

-57 said:

If Genesis 3 is a metaphor, parable, myth...what ever, then what really happen?

If there was no Garden, no real Adam, no Eve created from Adams side, no serpent, no tree of knowledge of good and evil and no fall Can the Theo-Evo's tell us why we are sinners in need of a savior?

When did mankind sin? What stage of evolution?
Why does mankind sin?
How was mankind thrust into sin in need of a savior?

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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.

-57 said:

Once again another has dodged the question.

When did sin begin?
Why did sin begin?
How did sin begin?

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Okay. I'll play.
Sin began when Lucifer got proud and tried to be equal with God. That is also why and how sin began. It did not begin with Adam and Eve. It was already there with Satan who came to Eve in the form of a talking serpent.

Akita Suggagaki said:

you jump to a lot of conclusions.

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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...?

-57 said:

If there was no Garden, no real Adam, no Eve created from Adams side, no serpent, no tree of knowledge of good and evil and no fall Can the Theo-Evo's tell us why we are sinners in need of a savior?

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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.
Blessings

-57 said:

If it's instinct of survival then why should we be held accountable and need a savior?

Secondly if so can you back it up with scripture? I was kinda curious because the bible doesn't really say it was instinct. Paul tells us in Romans 5:19 For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

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Our bodies enjoyed the immortality of our souls. A consequence of the fall was that our bodies die and now want to survive.

fhansen said:

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.

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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.

Oscarr said:

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.

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And I said nothing to contradict that

If there was no garden, no serpent, and Adam and Eve are just characters- so what? We don't lose the knowledge that our fallen nature is the result of the sins of our common parents, and that it resulted in their expulsion from Paradise.

-57 said:

If Genesis 3 is a metaphor, parable, myth...what ever, then what really happen?

If there was no Garden, no real Adam, no Eve created from Adams side, no serpent, no tree of knowledge of good and evil and no fall Can the Theo-Evo's tell us why we are sinners in need of a savior?

When did mankind sin? What stage of evolution?
Why does mankind sin?
How was mankind thrust into sin in need of a savior?

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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.

In the Garden is the Tree of Life, which is Jesus, whom God's children are free to eat from and live. There is also the Tree of Knowledge, which is the Mosaic Law. All of the different animals are the Gentiles, just like Peter's vision in Acts. Adam and Eve are the Hebrew Nation. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is the desire to justify oneself by obedience to the Law. Trying to do so brings death to those who sin.

After God brought Israel out of Egypt, they looked back upon what they were called out of, just as Lot's wife looked back. They built an idol to worship and doubted God and could not re-enter God's rest, just as Adam and Eve were expelled from God's rest, Eden.

Just as Adam was cursed to till the soil, which is man's works, the Jews also had to work. Paul's description of the law and works from Romans expresses this.

Genesis is full of allegorical stories depicting Jesus and prophecies of what was to come.

-57 said:

If it's instinct of survival then why should we be held accountable and need a savior?

Secondly if so can you back it up with scripture? I was kinda curious because the bible doesn't really say it was instinct. Paul tells us in Romans 5:19 For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

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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.

Jesus came to give light to the world. As John testified, the light shined in the darkness, but the darkness perceived it not (John 1:5). Looking for the Garden of Eden is like looking into the darkness; the place can not be found. Believing Jesus' teachings is like the approaching dawn.

-57 said:

You throw away what you do know about the fall.
Gen 3 tells of it. Even the NT authors often discuss it as literal history. Would you like to address some of those issues?

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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 so ancient, we understand that the writer 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)]

For example why did Paul write a letter to Timothy which presented guidance for women based upon a literal account of Adam, Eve and the fall?

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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).]

-57 said:

If it's instinct of survival then why should we be held accountable and need a savior?

Secondly if so can you back it up with scripture? I was kinda curious because the bible doesn't really say it was instinct. Paul tells us in Romans 5:19 For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.

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Some things are just natural consequences and bad habits yield bad results. I don't buy the "one man mythology". Even since we as humans could make choices we sometimes choose badly.

So in my view Jesus saves us primarily by his moral example rather than by some expiation to a God that requires a human sacrifice.

Is that your belief, that the Father required the death of Jesus befor humans could be forgiven?

lifepsyop said:

Then how can you say that the story of Christ's death and resurrection isn't simply a spiritual/metaphorical lesson? What do you actually accept in the Bible as true events?

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Being that the Gospel narratives are written at a much later time, during the Roman era, a time in which historical writing had progressed to another stage, AND many aspects of the New Testament narratives and data were gathered from at least 2nd hand accounts, some 1st hand, then what we have in the N.T. (other than the book of Revelation) present information about Jesus that is more or less contemporary with the times in which it is written.

However, in the case of Moses, when he (or some Israelites) wrote Genesis, not only were his references many centuries old, but no one other than God was there "in the Beginning." And we can't just assume that God told Moses all of what we find in Genesis. No, we have to assume that Moses wrote the earliest parts of Genesis as best as he could with the partial info he had at hand, and some motivation by God to correct the errors being made theologically by the surrounding cultures of that time.

Akita Suggagaki said:

Some things are just natural consequences and bad habits yield bad results. I don't buy the "one man mythology". Even since we as humans could make choices we sometimes choose badly.

So in my view Jesus saves us primarily by his moral example rather than by some expiation to a God that requires a human sacrifice.

Is that your belief, that the Father required the death of Jesus befor humans could be forgiven?

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While I don't side with our Fundamentalist brethren at all points in our respective hermeneutical practices, I do think that we should be careful not to equivocate between God's requirement for human death as a penalty for sin, on the one hand, and the merely distasteful idea of a "human sacrifice," on the other hand.

Just something to think about, although if someone like yourself wants to hold to a 'moral exemplar' reading of Christ's death, I won't bludgeon you for it.

-57 said:

If there was no Garden, no real Adam, no Eve created from Adams side, no serpent, no tree of knowledge of good and evil and no fall Can the Theo-Evo's tell us why we are sinners in need of a savior?

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Because we're sinners. We aren't guilty of Adam's sins, we're guilty of our own.

When did mankind sin?

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"Mankind" doesn't sin, you and I do.

What stage of evolution?

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Irrelevant.

How was mankind thrust into sin in need of a savior?

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"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.

No literal talking snake necessary.[/quote]

Oscarr said:

If Genesis was not revealed to Moses by God as the truth of what really happened in history, then your questions can't be answered, for the following reasons:
1. There is no God who gave revelation to Moses.
2. There is no sin.
3. Therefore there was no point where mankind actually started sinning.
4. Because there is no sin, there is no plan of salvation, therefore no need for a saviour.

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Perfect example of "logical defenestration".

-57 said:

If Genesis 3 is a metaphor, parable, myth...what ever, then what really happen?

If there was no Garden, no real Adam, no Eve created from Adams side, no serpent, no tree of knowledge of good and evil and no fall Can the Theo-Evo's tell us why we are sinners in need of a savior?

When did mankind sin? What stage of evolution?
Why does mankind sin?
How was mankind thrust into sin in need of a savior?

Click to expand...

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.

The reason to look at this account as a non-literal account could be for various reasons but a strong one might be that if we assume Moses penned this account through divine authority then this is 2500 years after the fact and that's a long time for an oral account to be preserved without corruption.

Some questions we need to ask are:

What did the post-exodus Hebrew's believe before Moses told them the orthodox account?
Was there competing accounts analogous to the fall of man in surrounding cultures?
Do the post-exodus Hebrews show us a dis-value to truth in favour of false teaching?

Then ask does it matter? If this is a non-literal account then does it affect the main points of the account that man is fallen and needs a redeemer regardless of how it may have actually happened?

The details that make up the account are important but I don't see the surface literal meaning important but rather a greater message being proclaimed in the account. If we are to accept a strict literal account then we should absolutely avoid snakes at all costs because it's just not worth getting caught in their deception again and it shows us that there is a secret garden hidden in the world with the gift of eternal life, but look out its guarded by an angel. These are not productive messages of the account nor are they anything to do with the point of it but a strict literal interpretation demands it.