What is the Bible and why led to it's creation?

[MrGoodbar]

Your 'many scholars' contradict what logic would tell us, too.

Ok, I'll bite. What does logic tell us?

 

[CShephard53]

Ok, I'll bite. What does logic tell us?

Logic tells us that the style and actual timing (what dating actually shows, versus what scholars think) indicate Moses as the author of Genesis, and was not simply epic poetry or legend. For that matter, it has far too much structure that would indicate a historical account, not simply a legend. It follows the same style the rest of the Bible follows in terms of events- and most of those events have been shown to be historical.

 

[MrGoodbar]

Interesting. Let me start off by saying that I believe the Bible is God's word, and is exactly what we are supposed to have (in the original Greek and Hebrew, WITH all the little textual puzzles). I believe it contains histories as God wants us to know them, fictive tales that teach us just as Jesus' parables do, and the most beautiful poetry the world has seen. In many of its mysteries and puzzles, it calls us back again and again, and through it, God calls us to depend on him. It is brilliant on levels that we can barely comprehend.

That said, Genesis and the Old Testament books are fascinating in their different styles. Ths structure of the creation story has a poetic quality to it, and uses much of the style of mythological writing of the time. Doesn't mean it isn't true, just that its style is such.

It most certainly differs in form from the Deuteronomic historical books of 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and also from 1 and 2 Chronicles, which rarely flow into a poetic style.

Food for thought. Derived from scholarly logic...

 

[beamishboy]

Interesting. Let me start off by saying that I believe the Bible is God's word, and is exactly what we are supposed to have (in the original Greek and Hebrew, WITH all the little textual puzzles). I believe it contains histories as God wants us to know them, fictive tales that teach us just as Jesus' parables do, and the most beautiful poetry the world has seen. In many of its mysteries and puzzles, it calls us back again and again, and through it, God calls us to depend on him. It is brilliant on levels that we can barely comprehend.

That said, Genesis and the Old Testament books are fascinating in their different styles. Ths structure of the creation story has a poetic quality to it, and uses much of the style of mythological writing of the time. Doesn't mean it isn't true, just that its style is such.

It most certainly differs in form from the Deuteronomic historical books of 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and also from 1 and 2 Chronicles, which rarely flow into a poetic style.

Food for thought. Derived from scholarly logic...

I think the primary aim of the Bible is to point us to Jesus. For this reason, I simply laugh when atheists insist that the Bible is wrong because of Genesis. My answer to that is if God had wanted to write a science book, he would have done it which would surpass all the science books in the whole world. But that is not what the Bible is about. It does not seek to teach us biology or botany. It only points us to Jesus' redemptive work on the cross. Everything else fades into insignificance.

If atheists don't accept that, that's their prerogative. I'm still at battle with them in the General Apologetics forum in which I spend most of my time. I used to think they were genuine in seeking the truth but I think I can see now that most of them are just hardened against Christ. But it will make it so much harder to dialogue with them if we insist that the Bible teaches us biology or history. I always tell myself I mustn't miss the wood for the trees.

 

[MrGoodbar]

I agree that it does point to Jesus' work on the cross, and think you're spot on with your comments on the science book.

No matter what you think, how much you can back it up, the fact is, there is no "proof." Hence we have been given the gift of faith.

 

[artybloke]

Ok, I'll bite. What does logic tell us?

He's a fundie. logic ain't got nowt to do with it.

 

[beamishboy]

He's a fundie. logic ain't got nowt to do with it.

Hi, who is it that you're calling a fundie? It's not good to label people, really. We're all followers of our Lord. We're all His sheep.

Frankly, I never knew the word until I joined CF last month. I learn new things all the time. Hehe.

 

[artybloke]

Fundamentalism ultimately leads away from Christ, into bothering about periferies such as 6-day creationism, or who wrote the Penteteuch, or the "death-of-a-thousand qualification" that happens when you have to believe that there are no contradictions or historical mistakes in the Bible.

Really, their faith is not in the Christ who died & rose again, but in a text: in practice, they worship the Bible (or rather their interpretation of it), not Christ. Just as Islamic fundamentalists don't follow Allah, but their own twisted interpretation of the Koran.

 

[beamishboy]

Fundamentalism ultimately leads away from Christ, into bothering about periferies such as 6-day creationism, or who wrote the Penteteuch, or the "death-of-a-thousand qualification" that happens when you have to believe that there are no contradictions or historical mistakes in the Bible.

Really, their faith is not in the Christ who died & rose again, but in a text: in practice, they worship the Bible (or rather their interpretation of it), not Christ. Just as Islamic fundamentalists don't follow Allah, but their own twisted interpretation of the Koran.

Wow, you have a very strong opinion about fundamentalists. I didn't know what fundamentalism was until I came to this forum last month. Before that, I just thought they were very devout Christians who hated tradition. My aunt is one such person. She became a Baptist and her vicar is from America. I hear most fundamentalists are from America.

She tried to get me to go to her church but as an altar boy, I could not. Besides, my school is entirely Anglican and we follow a tradition that spans the entire 650 years or so of my school's history. I always joke that my school is more than twice as old as America. Hehe.

I don't really think of fundamentalists in the way you painted them out to be. I think they're very sincere people but they really hate traditions and rituals. She told me once that robes were of the devil!!! I think apart from being a bit weird, she's actually got a good heart and she's very much into evangelism, which is something we don't do, at least my family does not.

I think there is room in our faith for all kinds of people. As long as we get the basics right and we all believe in our Lord and Saviour, the author and finisher of our faith, we are fellow members of the same fold. I don't think it's good to split hairs. I accept my aunt as a fine Christian. It's she who thinks Anglicans are going to hell. Hehe.

 

[artybloke]

Fundamentalists as individuals are probably very nice. As a species, however, they are doing untold damage to the church.

 

[beamishboy]

Fundamentalists as individuals are probably very nice. As a species, however, they are doing untold damage to the church.

I don't know about damage. I've been to my aunt's church once. I was quite worried when she gave me a list of don'ts. Don't genuflect. Don't ever cross yourself. Don't say aloud the responses after the readings and during prayers. Don't kneel when prayers are to be said. Don't turn to the right or to the left during service since Creeds aren't said. Don't say the collect.

When she had finished, I thought she was going to take me to a mosque since everything Christian could NOT be done in her church. When I entered her church, it really was like a mosque. There were no figures of anything. No carvings. My aunt said it was an abomination to God!!! There were no altar boys which was a let-down because I was hoping to see what my fellow altar boys of a different denomination dressed in since my aunt was so opposed to robes. There were no candles, no processional cross, in fact, no procession at all. It was a bit like a synagogue. There were no Bibles on the pews because everyone brought his own Bible! There were no prayer books because they only said prayers that they composed themselves.

If the church was barren, the people were very warm. They were very friendly and lovely people. They really went out of their way to be nice. It's so different in Anglican churches. I've been to many anglican churches and everyone is more aloof. In the Baptist church the people were really warm.

So, I don't agree with you that fundamentalists as a group are bad. They were more Christ-like than the Anglicans I know. They could not have been putting on a show. They were too genuinely warm. I liked the people very much but the church service didn't agree with me. It didn't feel like a proper service but that was probably because I was not used to that sort of service.

My conclusion is fundamentalists whether as a group or as individuals are very nice people. It's only that their churches aren't so pretty and the services aren't (at least to me personally) so fulfilling.

 

[CShephard53]

He's a fundie. logic ain't got nowt to do with it.

Do me a favor next time and address the issue rather than the person. I've been over this with you before Arty, and I'm sick of going over it again. You cannot know what God said without the Bible. Using something as a source for primary information is not worshiping it.

 

[CShephard53]

Fundamentalists as individuals are probably very nice. As a species, however, they are doing untold damage to the church.

Nice claim, but it doesn't have ANY evidence that you've posted.

 

[CShephard53]

You're merely repeating yourself. That gets you nowhere, nor does it get the discussion anywhere.

 

[BigNorsk]

artybloke,

Am I reading wrong or do you prefer the higher critical examinations of the Bible? Studies based on the idea that the things written in the Bible are simply borrowed from the cultures of the time?

Noah and the flood is simply a Hebrew version of the common flood myth for instance.

Jesus and Mary come from Mithraism is another common one now.

It seems to me to basically deny that the bible is God breathed. It becomes simply a book written by men to promote their own agenda. Ultimately under the theory, nothing of import is actually revealed by the bible, it is simply a product of it's culture that believed like many others that it was God's chosen people. And wrote the Bible to show that.

So what is it? Is the Bible God breathed, or is it simply another book written by man?

Marv

 

[artybloke]

So what is it? Is the Bible God breathed, or is it simply another book written by man?

The Bible is a book that was written by human beings. And those human writers were inspired by God. The words themselves are not straight from God. They go through human beings.

Am I reading wrong or do you prefer the higher critical examinations of the Bible? Studies based on the idea that the things written in the Bible are simply borrowed from the cultures of the time?

I love this insertion of the word "simply". You assume it must be either one or the other. Of course they borrowed things from other cultures. But it's what they did with what they borrowed that makes the Bible unique: for instance, how the creation stories are a radical revision of ancient near-Eastern creation stories. It's not where they got their ideas from that matters, it's what they did with those ideas. That's where the inspiration comes in: through the imagination. I know some fundamentalists seem to be scared of the imagination, hence they have such bare churches, and seem to baulk at the idea of poetry or fiction as if they some kind of evil. But Jesus told parables, so I see no logical reason why they writers of Genesis can't use their inspired imaginations to tell stories about creation in seven days or floods. That's doesn't make the whole of the Bible "unfactual."

Jesus and Mary come from Mithraism is another common one now.

That's not an idea that I came across in the early '80's when I was doing theology, but I don't know why the authors of the gospels, if they'd known those stories, couldn't have borrowed something from the way those stories were told in order to make their story accessible and lively to the people they were writing to. That's a different thing from saying that it's simply a retelling, though: it's about using something familiar to the audience to convey something new to the audience. Much in the way that when I was younger the university Christian drama group once did "The parable of the good punk rocker."

That's what accomadationalism is: shaping the message to the people who are hearing it, without compromising anything essential.

I don't see what the fuss is about higher criticism anyway. It may come to conclusions about authorship or historical accuracy of some parts that are uncomfortable to those who want everything to be scientifically accurate because they're uncomfortable with the idea that some of the Bible might be fictional. But that's their modernist scientistic minds that are at fault, not the Bible for being a work of divinely-inspired imagination.

 

[beamishboy]

The Bible is a book that was written by human beings. And those human writers were inspired by God. The words themselves are not straight from God. They go through human beings.



I love this insertion of the word "simply". You assume it must be either one or the other. Of course they borrowed things from other cultures. But it's what they did with what they borrowed that makes the Bible unique: for instance, how the creation stories are a radical revision of ancient near-Eastern creation stories. It's not where they got their ideas from that matters, it's what they did with those ideas. That's where the inspiration comes in.

That's not an idea that I came across in the early '80's when I was doing theology, but I don't why the authors of the gospels, if they'd known those stories, couldn't have borrowed something from the way those stories were told in order to make their story accessible to the people they were writing to. That's a different thing from saying that it's simply a retelling, though: it's about using something familiar to the audience to convey something new to the audience. Much in the way that when I was younger the university Christian drama group once did "The parable of the good punk rocker."

That's what accomadationalism is: shaping the message to the people who are hearing it, without compromising anything essential.

I don't see what the fuss is about higher criticism anyway. It may come to conclusions about authorship or historical accuracy of some parts that are uncomfortable to those who want everything to be scientifically accurate because they're uncomfortable with the idea that some of the Bible might be fictional.

Actually, I think the argument between you guys is unfortunate. It's a cultural thing. Artybloke's views are the same as mine actually. That's what I was taught. I checked Artybloke's profile and I think we are VERY SIMILAR.

But I understand that most Americans are fundamentalists. They can't understand why we Anglicans do certain things and believe certain things.

I think we shouldn't fight over these things. It's cultural, like I said. Who are we to tell Americans that they should be in the Church of England? Besides, this forum is predominantly American, I believe.

So, we should allow our brothers in the Lord to hold to views that are different. It's not like they don't believe in the Holy Trinity or something. If they believe in a historical Flood, it doesn't really matter, does it? I heard they have museums that said dinosaurs lived 3000 years ago. I did find that odd but we can't be so intolerant, can we?

The good thing is we all believe in Jesus and it's by his grace that we are with God. His grace should be sufficient for all of us.

 

[BigNorsk]

Actually fundamentalism would be a minority of Americans. Maybe you get a mistaken impression because news media likes to take wierd fringe groups and have a news story on them and portray them as Chrstian fundamentalists. The term is much abused and maybe it should just be dropped, because fundamentalism is not being used as it is defined.

Fundamentalism was a reform movement in reaction to modernism.

Fundamentalists have a high view of the bible. A recent statement that would be a good explanation would be the Chicago statemen on biblical inerrancy.

If you take the time to read it. You will find it says a lot of things you probably would agree with. The explanations are very educational if you haven't read it before.

You might not agree that the proper way to do exegesis is the grammatico-historical method.

Maybe you aren't familiar with it? It is not reading the scriptures in a stereotypical literalist manner. Poetry is understood as poetry, apocalyptic literature as apocalyptic, and so on. There are basic rules for how to do it. At the foundation of it is the fact that the bible is different. It is God-breathed, other books are not. That style goes back to the way Jesus and the Apostles used scripture, they appealed to single words indeed even the form of a single word as absolute proof something was true. If higher criticism is correct, then you can't do that. You can't trust a letter or a word or even an entire story to be correct. "It is written" means little or nothing.

That isn't to say the bible is dictated, that's a mistaken stereotype again of fundamentalism. Though there are a couple of places where very much God says to write down exactly what he says. But most is not dictated.

The basic complaint against higher criticism is that Jesus pointing to scripture as proof is nonsense. The bible doesn't mean anything, you take a bunch of scholars and they go back and they try to recreate things and make conclusions about it. Their conclusions are always subject to revision when the next fellow needs his PhD.

You notice that very thing in this thread. Did you notice the reference that according to many scholars, Genesis was written many years after Moses. Well maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. Jewish tradition isn't infallible. But that is really a reflection of a large school of modernist thinking. They think by definition that the things written as prophesy were written after the fact. That is that it is not prophesy but history written to pretend to prophesy. That's because the scholars don't believe in God being the source of scripture. Instead they have to look to the world, how does someone write about something that hasn't happened? Scholarly answer, he doesn't, he writes about an event that already took place, as if he was foretelling it.

Biblical archeology has really been quite a blow to modernism and it's higher criticism of the Bible because time after time the archeologist have found evidence of towns the modernists say didn't actually exist, and events they say didn't actually happen.

But they pretty well ignore the fact that they have been proven wrong repeatedy, they just hold out the modernists idea of scholarship as the judge over all and lead their flock of sheep. They have quite an ego about it too. Hence the statement that fundamentalism has nothing to do with logic. Just an attempt to mischaracterize fundamentalists as unlearned, and illogical.

Marv

 

[artybloke]

They think by definition that the things written as prophesy were written after the fact.

The largest part of the Penteteuch is not prophesy, so this argument doesn't hold water. Most of it is either myth, legend, history or law. Personally, I've never seen the point of writing something before it could be understood (or understood "properly"*, whatever that means) by the people that read it.

The basic complaint against higher criticism is that Jesus pointing to scripture as proof is nonsense. The bible doesn't mean anything,

Then it's a complaint that is completely without foundation. No higher critic - certainly no Christian higher critic - thinks that the Bible is "without meaning." They may disagree with your particular understanding of it, however.

That's because the scholars don't believe in God being the source of scripture.

That's also without foundation, unless you think that God doesn't work in any other way except supernaturally. But God is the God of creation, working in and through the world in a perfectly natural way. Maybe sometimes he works miracles: but mostly he doesn't need to.

Biblical archeology has really been quite a blow to modernism and it's higher criticism of the Bible because time after time the archeologist have found evidence of towns the modernists say didn't actually exist, and events they say didn't actually happen.

I don't see how that affects "higher criticism." Firstly because of the uncertainty of archeology (one day they've found Jericho, the next they haven't); and secondly because proving that a place in Israel is real doesn't prove that something happened there. Just as proving that London exists doesn't prove that Charles Dickens novels set in London aren't fictional. I once read a commentary on Acts (with which I disagreed, by the way) that argued that Acts was fictional, and that the details of real places in it were no more than could be expected from a good historical novelist. I agree with the second half of that statement, in a way; but I don't think that Acts was intended to be fictional. I don't think it's necessarily 100% accurate, any more than any early historical writing is; but I don't think it's fictional either.

There's also, of course, a lot of the Bible which archeology doesn't touch. The story of David & Goliath, for instance, is not something that would leave any discernible historical evidence. Neither, actually, is Abraham's journey from Ur; we've got lots of evidence of wandering people in the desert from all ages, but no rock with Abraham's name on it. Nor, I suspect, will we ever find one. Moses' existence goes totally unnoticed by any Egyptian chronicler... etc, etc...

*It usually means "so that it agrees with our theology."

 

[CShephard53]

Actually, I think the argument between you guys is unfortunate. It's a cultural thing. Artybloke's views are the same as mine actually. That's what I was taught. I checked Artybloke's profile and I think we are VERY SIMILAR.

But I understand that most Americans are fundamentalists. They can't understand why we Anglicans do certain things and believe certain things.

I think we shouldn't fight over these things. It's cultural, like I said. Who are we to tell Americans that they should be in the Church of England? Besides, this forum is predominantly American, I believe.

So, we should allow our brothers in the Lord to hold to views that are different. It's not like they don't believe in the Holy Trinity or something. If they believe in a historical Flood, it doesn't really matter, does it? I heard they have museums that said dinosaurs lived 3000 years ago. I did find that odd but we can't be so intolerant, can we?

The good thing is we all believe in Jesus and it's by his grace that we are with God. His grace should be sufficient for all of us.

When said views lessen the authoritativeness of Scripture and accuse the Bible writers of copying- smartly or otherwise- when such accusations have little backing to them, I am going to 'fight' about it. Hopefully one could do so in a civil manner, however. That's the part where people tend to fall, not in 'fighting' itself.