Solid As A Rock

[Assyrian]

Well, the geneology in Luke literally reads..."Enos, which was of Seth, which was of Adam..." Matthew, however records the geneology as "Abraham begat Isaac; Isaac begat Jacob;" so..it's pretty clear that it is a biological relationship and some of the characters are repeated in the geneologies. One line traces through Joseph as the supposed father and the other goes through Joseph's father in law, Mary's lineage. So...why would the writers mention actual fathers and sons but then throw in some allegorical characters?

Is Adam's relationship with God biological? If you want to look at biblical genealogies, at some stage you move away from a simple father son relationship.

But even if the story of Adam and Eve is allegorical it doesn't mean 'Adam' didn't exist. Adam may be allegorical, but it is an allegorical name for something very real. Adam is God's name for the human race. And yes, Jesus of Nazareth was a child of the human race, the human race God created. Jesus is a Son of Man.

I believe He's actually called "the last Adam"...the verse in context is referring to Christ being raised a life-giving spirit.

Sorry I was working from memory there. Paul calls Jesus the second man and the last Adam, though I am sure Adam Smith would have disagreed with the last part. And if you accept Noah, Abraham and Moses were real literal people then Jesus was hardly 'the second man' either.

So Paul was not describing Jesus literally or historically when he called him 'the second man' in 1Cor 15:47. Was he being literal and historical when he called Adam 'the first man' a few lines before in verse 45?

I think he was speaking in tongues...he actually said he wanted a cracker lol.

Sadly he is only a hypothetical parrot. But real parrots are living, and Eve is not their mother. Genesis calls Eve mother of all living (chai) a word which describes not just human beings but beasts of the earth, beasts of the field, and living birds too.

 

[RenHoek]

Well, apparently no matter how the thread starts in this forum it inevitably degrades into the same old He said he said.

I just had, what I considered, an interesting thought as it related to the way God tells us to live. It just seemed strange to me a God that was big, throughout scripture, on firm foundations would open with something less than concrete truth (concrete truth = literal history).

 

[rmwilliamsll]

Well, the geneology in Luke literally reads..."Enos, which was of Seth, which was of Adam..." Matthew, however records the geneology as "Abraham begat Isaac; Isaac begat Jacob;" so..it's pretty clear that it is a biological relationship and some of the characters are repeated in the geneologies.

Luke 3:23-38 is a list of names connected by tou=of. there is no reuse of the term huios=son from Luke 3:23. My Greek is not good enough to be sure that the "which was" is not an interpreter's addition to make the "of" more clear.

the problem with Luke's account, as far as this discussion is concerned is that he makes no distinction between:
Seth of Adam and Adam of God. this relationship is clearly not the same, but analogous, at best.


Matt 1 uses the full connector "de gennao tou".
the problem with Matthews geneology for the purposes of this discussion is that there is NO distinction between:
Jesus son of Abraham
Jesus son of David
in Matt 1:1 and the rest of the list.
Plus the fact that the generations are manipulated to have the 14, 14 pattern, thus demonstrating that Jesus is the Jubilee.

some of the characters are repeated in the geneologies.
some?!
i don't even need to get into the fact that the lists of names here are different, both from each other and from other data from the OT presents. this has always been a problem for Biblical scholars and there is no reason to rehash what has no real solution here(one of Joseph and one of Mary etc).

 

[shernren]

Matt 1 uses the full connector "de gennao tou".
the problem with Matthews geneology for the purposes of this discussion is that there is NO distinction between:
Jesus son of Abraham
Jesus son of David
in Matt 1:1 and the rest of the list.
Plus the fact that the generations are manipulated to have the 14, 14 pattern, thus demonstrating that Jesus is the Jubilee.

The bigger problem is that since Adam to Terah don't appear in Matthew 1, it has no bearing on whether or not they were historical.

 

[rmwilliamsll]

on firm foundations would open with something less than concrete truth (concrete truth = literal history).

Can't you see how historically conditioned this statement is?

the implicit foundationalism.
the alignment of literal and history,
the idea that only history as vs. myth is really true, the idea that truth is something substantial ie concrete.
the idea that history is factual, not tied to who is writing it and the agenda that they must have.

Your statement itself places you into a very particular history moment in human history. People didn't think this way before the enlightment and most of these ideas are being deeply challenged today and it remains to be seen where philsophy goes on these issues from here.

But the big point is, that this statement would not have been even understandable to a 1stC Israelite or a 2nd millennium BC. Temple Hebrew. You might as well be describing how a phaser works as to explain the constellation of ideas that underlie this statement to them.

 

[RenHoek]

Can't you see how historically conditioned this statement is?

Not in context with the beginning of my post.

People didn't think this way before the enlightment…

I am unconcerned with how people think, and that appears to be our disconnect. I am searching for the heart of God. I am concerned how He would lead off, and that has nothing to do with who wrote it or when.

At the risk of making all the TE’s angry, can’t you see how diluted the point always becomes? Why does everyone seem to think that God cannot be simply understood? Do you all think He is that unknowable without years of education?

Regardless, I went away for a while before and it appears time for another hibernation.

 

[Mallon]

At the risk of making all the TE’s angry, can’t you see how diluted the point always becomes? Why does everyone seem to think that God cannot be simply understood? Do you all think He is that unknowable without years of education?

I think TEs would argue exactly the opposite of what you suppose.
The simplicity and very human perspective of Genesis is exactly what makes God knowable, I would argue. The Bible speaks in very human terms: the appearance of the sun rising and setting, the attribution of sickness to intangible demons, the hammered-out dome of the sky. Had God made any attempt to tell His truths within the framework of 21st century science, I doubt very much if such a story would have caught on, let alone persist for several thousand years.
God is simply understood in the Bible -- that is the purpose of the Scriptures, after all. I simply take issue with those who would conflate the Bible's revelation of God with a revelation of science.

 

[Melethiel]

I am unconcerned with how people think, and that appears to be our disconnect. I am searching for the heart of God. I am concerned how He would lead off, and that has nothing to do with who wrote it or when.

What makes you think that God would write with a Western, post-Enlightement mindset? That's a very anthropocentric way of looking at things. Coming from an Eastern European culture, I find leading off with a story perfectly natural.

 

[rmwilliamsll]

People didn't think this way before the enlightment…


I am unconcerned with how people think, and that appears to be our disconnect. I am searching for the heart of God. I am concerned how He would lead off, and that has nothing to do with who wrote it or when.

that is nice, however if you think you will find the "heart of God" in Scripture without understanding to whom it was first written and something about their history and culture, you will merely be reading your own culture into your interpretation of Scripture. Scripture is not addressed to us, it is not written in our language, it is not using the major cultural motifs of our time, but rather it is written in Hebrew and Greek, is written in the culture of those times and is throughly a product of that mileui. Now if God is the author of Scripture it is not MERELY a human document, but it is first a human one, it is human language that we read and human culture that we interact with. To neglect this crucial element of the historical-grammatical hermeneutic is to fail to properly read the Scriptures.

 

[shernren]

At the risk of making all the TE’s angry, can’t you see how diluted the point always becomes? Why does everyone seem to think that God cannot be simply understood? Do you all think He is that unknowable without years of education?

It is not so much that God Himself is difficult to know, but more that it can be difficult for us to know Him. We need to know how we think, and how the writers of the Bible thought, in order to make full use of the Bible.

Allow me an analogy. Shakespeare wrote a lot about love, but he did so in a very different era, with different customs and attitudes towards many things. That is why we find his writings difficult: we cannot understand why he would say certain things, or write certain scenes, or how he would have expected the audience to react. We don't understand the writer or the people he wrote for.

Does that mean our quest is hopeless? Not necessarily: we can experience love right here and now for ourselves, and we can even make out here and there what Shakespeare was trying to say. But if we really want every bit of richness Shakespeare wrote as he wrote about love, we will have to learn how our thoughts differ from his, and how to make the transition from our culture into his and back again.

It's the same with the Bible. We are eavesdropping, as it were, on conversations between God and the people of the Bible. Is it impossible to know God without trying to understand the Bible's setting and our modern culture? Probably not, we can experience God right here and now, and given our English translations we can roughly grasp the overall picture of what happened in the Bible. But if we are to get every bit of richness from the Bible we can get, we will have to learn how our thoughts and our culture differ from those of the ANE Jews and Greeks, and we will need to learn how to translate from our culture into theirs and back again.

 

[Xaero]

Why would a God that states these things build His Word on an allegory and not a rock solid truth?

I think all TEs admit that the fall did happen. It seems possible that things like: 'tree of knowledge of good and evil', 'forbidden fruit' and 'talking snakes' are only metaphors for a certain event, but such an interpretation doesn't oppose the message that sin entered the world because man disobeyed gods commandment and therefore has the need for a redeemer.

At the risk of making all the TE’s angry, can’t you see how diluted the point always becomes? Why does everyone seem to think that God cannot be simply understood? Do you all think He is that unknowable without years of education?

Proverb 1:22 "How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?"

Proverb 1:5,6 "A wise [man] will hear, and will increase learning; and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels: To understand a proverb, and the interpretation; the words of the wise, and their dark sayings."

 

[Assyrian]

People didn't think this way before the enlightment…

I am unconcerned with how people think, and that appears to be our disconnect. I am searching for the heart of God. I am concerned how He would lead off, and that has nothing to do with who wrote it or when.

At the risk of making all the TE’s angry, can’t you see how diluted the point always becomes? Why does everyone seem to think that God cannot be simply understood? Do you all think He is that unknowable without years of education?

Regardless, I went away for a while before and it appears time for another hibernation.

I think it is easy to understand God in simplicity if we approach him in the simplicity and trust of a child.

But we need to grow in our understanding of God too. We hit a problem because God's thoughts are above our thoughts and his way beyond our ways. There are a number of key factors that take us further. Obviously we need to study God's word. But we also need the Spirit of God in our hearts, the one who knows the mind of God in the first place. But there is more. We need our minds transformed not conformed to the world.

You can be an academic and understand all the cultural settings of the bible, but without the Spirit of God in you heart a child could know God better than you.

Alternatively you may be a Spirit filled born again bible believer, but if you don't understand how your mind is conformed to the thought patterns of the world you will not get beyond the understanding of the child. We are called to more than simplicity, we are to 'gird up the loins of our mind' and 'in our thinking be men'.

We need that simple understanding of God, but we also neeed to realise that there are things about God that are just not simple. It is a mistake to confuse the two.

 

[artybloke]

I think all TEs admit that the fall did happen.

Though some of us are inclined to think that it wasn't a historical event, more that it's something that happens constantly whenever we fall short of the glory of God.

Why does everyone seem to think that God cannot be simply understood? Do you all think He is that unknowable without years of education?

I don't think God can be "understood" full stop, if you mean comprehended by the mind. God is too big, too spiritual, too mysterious a concept to be grasped by the human mind.

Nobody - however clever they are - "understands" God. We all see through a glass darkly, we all catch glimpses of the divine, we percieve dimly through the great Cloud of Unknowing.

We don't "understand" God - we experience God, through scripture, through the church, through our own dim percievings, through the love of our neighbours. We often get God wrong because we all fall short of the glory of God.

God is not an idea that can be understood; God is ultimate personhood, the ground of our being. God is light, and how can we stand in that light?

To claim to understand God is the ultimate in arrogance.

 

[mushowani]

I do agree with the Assyrian. It takes one to have arelationship with God so as to come to a deep understanding as well as appreciation. It takes one to have an intimate relationship with Him so as to come to a full understanding of Him. It's jus like how you relate to other human beings; it's the establishment of arelationship first before anything else. God is a personality jus like nayone else; therefore there is a need to cultivate a strong relationship with Him so as to reach to the bottom of who He really is.