Adam and Eve

Yeah, BW, and they didn't have real kids, and Eve never received the real promise of the Messiah, and the line of Noah didn't trace back really through real people to Adam and therefore the genealogy of Christ is uncertain and, in fact, the entire basis of the Bible is rather shaky -- I mean, what kind of reality is based on mythology?

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edit -- explanation for those who are wondering why I came after BW so hard. He was here before and spent a lot of time declaring the Bible to be involved with a lot of mythology, analogy, legend, borrowed stories, etc. If you go back to the beginning posts in the creation/evolution forum you will find what he was declaring. I would rather not give his heresies a head start here again.

 

BW, Jesus believed Adam and Eve were real people who actually existed.

Why do you disagree with Christ?

 

Couldn't have said it better myself!

If the basis of the Bible rests on Young-Earth Creationism, then yes.

Theological reality is, but not historical reality.

Fortunately, you'll all agree with me sooner or later and thank me for my "heretical" posts...

 

> BW, Jesus believed Adam and Eve were real people who actually existed.

No, he didn't. He referred to the theological truth of mankind created male and female as expressed in Genesis 1.

That's not the same as affirming historical accuracy, which He never addressed.

 

Er...since when has it been heretical to take a non-literal view of the first few chapters of Genesis? Most in my church regard it as allegorical - see Literalism on our website - in addition, you can see from the quotes on that page that a non-literal interpretation has been the norm in the Church for many centuries. ISTM that the creationist viewpoint is a relatively recent theological innovation (with perhaps the exception of Archbishop Ussher), even among evangelicals. It's rise seems to be part and parcel of the rise of fundamentalism generally in the first half of the last century, and can be seen as primarily a modernist over-reaction against the Darwinism and liberal theology knocking around in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The pivotal event in this process seems to have been the Scopes 'monkey trial' in Tennessee in 1925.

However, the creationist worldview was certainly not the view of the early Church or the Reformers, and indeed, a non-literal reading of the creation account has been the position of the Christian Church since its earliest days, as I said above.

Question - which do I trust more: an interpretation of Scripture that the Church has taught for many centuries, or an interpretation that's sprung up in a minority of the Church in the last 100 years or so as a cack-handed response to the challenge of Darwin?

Yours in Christ

Matt

 

Sorry for the double-post but the URL I posted just takes you to my church's home page for some reason; to get to the literalism quotes you have to click on FAQs and then Literalism

Hope that works!

Yours in Christ

Matt

 

Matt, you and those who have taught you are badly mistaken about how Genesis was considered by the early church. Here, from another Englishman who has done an incredible amount of research, I offer you this link to his findings:

http://www.robibrad.demon.co.uk/Contents.htm

I encourage you to spend some time reading what he has found regarding what the early church fathers considered true.

You see, the Bible does rest on Genesis as historical reality. For if it is not real, then the basis of every major doctrine presented in the Bible, including salvation, is resting on a crumbling foundation and cannot be considered to be reliable.

Either God has been in control of His Word, or He has not. Either He has known how to communicate clearly with man, or He has not. These are A/non-A propositions; there is no middle ground.

And if you find yourself in a position of picking and choosing what you want to believe in the Bible, then you are also in a position -- and not an enviable one -- of needing to rely on your own very limited intelligence and understanding for your own faith, for you trust God less than you trust yourself, or man, in these matters.

And yet God said that the heart of man always tends toward evil from childhood.

Which makes trusting oneself rather chancy, don't you think?

 

I read your literalism page. They are missing some solid scientific evidence for a very young creation.

Try this fellow, who is a physicist:
www.setterfield.org
Go into the scientific publications

For other material, please check into
www.trueorigin.org

The second link contains articles by a number of very qualified authors regarding the subject.

There is not only a great deal of biological and genetic data that show evolution as presented to the public is impossible, but there is strong physical evidence that this is a VERY young creation.

All of which ends up pointing to the position Genesis has been holding and propounding for thousands of years.

 

Dear Helen, I tried accessing the web pages you directed me to and was unable to access the origins page. The church history page seems to be interpretation rather than sources - eg: a commentary on what the author thinks Origen said, rather than Origen's words, which my church has published.

I have to confess to being no scientist and therefore am unable to comment on your physicist's page. However, I have quite a few Christian friends who are scientists and they all take the theistic evolutionist POV which they, like me, regard as being the orthodox mainstream Christian viewpoint.

I disagree that the Bible has to rest on Genesis as historical reality. There are a number of levels on which one reads parts of the Bible - historical, yes, but also poetic/ allegorical eg the wisdom literature (Job, Proverbs, Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes), parabolic (eg Jesus' parables funnily enough - surely you're not saying that the parables represent real actual historical events?).

I'm simply saying that the YEC viewpoint is the minority view whereas the theistic evolutionary view represents the majority of Christians and is not heretical any more than YEC is; it's simply not a show-stopper. And this is a view that I have developed in tandem with those Christians around me, including those in authority over me - the Church in fact - so it's hardly a view that I've developed in isolation relying, as you put it, on my 'limited intelligence'.

Yours in Christ

Matt

 

I have to say that I disagree a little with the bold statements that Matt is making about a) theistic evolution and it's "acceptance" by a "majority of Christians", and b) the idea of "YEC" as a "recent interpretation".

In a nutshell, here is my understanding of how the first few chapters of Genesis have been interpreted over the years:

Pre-600's BC: Psalm 104 & earlier version of A&E written and taken as mythical, theological truth about God's creative acts.

650-550 BC: A&E written in Josiah's court under "Deuteronomic" theology & revised during the exile. Interpreted as literal, but not precise, history.

550-450 BC: Psalm 104 rewritten as Gen 1. Gen 5 genealogy written (and numbers calculated through Pythagorean influence). Combined with A&E to form present-day Genesis account. Interpreted as literal history with many layers of meaning.

450 BC-30 AD: Early chapters of Genesis taken literally (see Ben Sirach (180 BC) 25:24 "From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die."). Rewritten in Jubilees with expanded precision of numbers. Taken VERY literally as an apocalyptic blueprint in 1 Enoch.

30 AD-325 AD: Interpretation of early chapters varied. Hellenistic Alexandrians (like Philo and Origen) tended to interpret them allegorically, while Antiochines like Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa took them literally.

400 AD-1600s: Augustine combined these two approaches in a synthesis that left its mark on medieval theology.

1600s-1800s: Isaac Newton and the discovery of the natural sciences created, for the first time, the idea that the early chapters of Genesis constituted "facts" equivalent to scientific observation, and that each were complementary in proving the truth of the other. (This is the real birth of what we would call YEC-proper.)

1800s-on: The findings of geology render the dating systems of the Bible unlikely, giving birth to "Old-Earth Creationism". The findings of evolutionary theory cast doubt upon the historicity of Gen 1-11. The findings of physics imply that truth itself is not necessarily absolute and that the universe is not deterministic.

At that point, opinion splits between a) those who cling to the science-and-Bible-are-unified, Enlightenment-era YEC view and question the science behind the developments and b) those who cling to the science behind the developments and question both the unified Enlightenment theology and the 1500 years of Augustinian theology that they had inherited.

Comments:

a) While I myself am a TE, I disagree that TE is accepted by the "majority" of Christians worldwide (though I don't doubt that a majority of Christians in the UK do, seeing as how the Anglican church accepts theistic evolution). It's certainly not something that is at all common in the US, even among moderate Baptist circles. (I also think your church website trivializes the diversity of pre-Nicene interpretation in favor of the Alexandrian schools...)

b) I think one has to be careful to distinguish a "literal interpretation" from what you call "YEC". YEC is a post-scientific, post-Enlightment "extension" of a simple literal interpretation that would have baffled anyone living before the Renaissance. If you went back in time in your Delorean Time Machine to 180 BC and started talking to Ben Sirach (who wrote that all sin came from the woman) about vapor canopies and dinosaurs walking alongside men, he'd stare at you with a blank face. That kind of "scientific" improvisation on the written word wasn't part of their theology.

IMHO, YEC isn't just a few hundred years old, but goes all the way back to Newton's contemporaries (and Bacon in particular), and its underlying literal interpretation extends continuously through Palestinian circles (not Egyptian) all the way back to the Persian period.

Now, at the same time, I think that all those tens of billions of people over the course of those 2,500 years were flat wrong, to be frank, because later interpreters are irrelevant to the original intent of the compositions themselves, and the scientific and comparative solution of that problem appears to point to "historized myth" (IMHO, of course).

Comments?

 

Other than Origen, the ECF's who commented on Genesis took it literally.

I suppose that since the "first Adam" was mythical, the "second Adam" (Jesus) was as well???

 

Rom 6:23 For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Psalm 69:28 says "Let them be blotted out of the book of the living , and not be written with the righteous.

Could that be the living on this side of heaven?

So are you saying by the above no one under 20 goes to hell?

 

I'm saying that we need to be careful about what we proclaim in light of what the Scriptures say.

 

BWSmith,

What is the relevance of "theistic evolution" on Genesis? Do the choices of others impact its meaning?

If Adam was not an individual person, what do you believe concerning the genealogies of chpts 4 and 5?

 

"What does a baptist believe about Adam and Eve."

Adam:
See Gen 2:19 - Gen 5:5
Dt 32:8
I Chr 1:1
Job 31:33
Luke 3:38
Rom 5:14
I Cor 15:22, 45
I Tim 2:13-14
Jude 14

Eve:
See Gen 3:20 - Gen 4:1
II Cor 11:3
I Tim 2:13

I am sure other verses refer to them but these will do for a good foundation of what I believe about Adam and Eve.

The Bible was written for everyone to understand, not just the folks that can do mental gymnastics with mythological allegories and a proficiency in "TULIP" debating skills. If you don't believe that the Bible means what it says to ordinary everyday people who are reading it (using common sense) then that would make you the protector of truth and me, your humble servant.

If you have trouble believing a verse or phrase in Genesis then try to learn what that verse actually means instead of tearing down the entire structure and say that the whole thing means something else.

Genesis happened the way it is laid out and to the people it is attributed to. No other explanation is reasonable.

 

> BWSmith, What is the relevance of "theistic evolution" on Genesis? Do the choices of others impact its meaning?

Essentially, Genesis is about us, not about people in the distant past. We are all Adam and Cain and Noah.

> If Adam was not an individual person, what do you believe concerning the genealogies of chpts 4 and 5?

They are the same list (with Seth (Heb. replacement) and Enosh (Heb. mankind) thrown in Gen 5).

Check out the Sumerian King list for a similar genre. If the eastern kingdoms had one, Judah had to have one as well...

The names came first. The Gen 5 list came later following some concern that all mankind was descended from a murderer (Cain). The numbers in Gen 5 differ in the MT, LXX, and SP, which indicate a late application (post-exilic). They were "calculated" under Pythagorean influence (the idea that everything in the universe consists of numbers).

Comments?

 

BWSmith,

How did you arrive at this conclusion?

I realize writings of ancient civilizations have parallel passages, however, personally, I'm disinterested in such comparisons since they do not help me learn more about God.

Do you believe the Bible to be Divinely inspired? (Not the translations of it, nor the various Hebrew or Greek manuscripts contrasted with one another. I'm referring to the expressions and thoughts communicated in them.)

 

How did you arrive at this conclusion?

I realize writings of ancient civilizations have parallel passages, however, personally, I'm disinterested in such comparisons since they do not help me learn more about God.</font>[/QUOTE]Because in Genesis 2-3 Adam is not called "Adam", but Ha'adam (the man). As such, the figure of Adam serves as a symbol for all of mankind.

As the prologue for a long history of Israel that culminates in the exile, the story of Adam and Eve sets the stage for understanding why the Jews had to be removed from their "paradise": because they disobeyed God's "Laws" (Do not eat the fruit of the tree.)

I only do if I get to define what "inspired" means....

I don't believe in dictation or error guarding or supernatural preservation of the transmitted text. I think men experienced God and wrote out of their experience. The fact that we have the Bible today is testimony to its truth that is understood by believers, not testimony that God has forcibly selected and preserved "His Word".

 

Well now, BW, that puts the Bible just about on par with the Koran, the Vedas, and all the other books of other religions, wouldn't you say?

They believe their books are right and some of them even go so far as to say inspired, which you are essentially denying the Bible is.

Again, sir, you are depending on man's mind and putting it in authority greater than God's, which is just about what Romans 1 is talking about -- honoring the creature more than the Creator.

When this happens, it is a very short step to abortion, infanticide, euthenasia, domestic 'partners', and all the rest of man's denial of morality and ethics except as a matter of opinion and personal preference.

In saying what you have said here and before, you have denied the entire concept of right or wrong for its own sake and have gone back to the law of the jungle: might makes right. If you are in power you get to dictate morality, and nothing is right or wrong except what you say.

I sometimes find myself wondering if any of you folks of such liberal stripe ever think ahead to the logical conclusions -- the inevitable conclusions -- of your belief system.