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nin:

I don't care whether anyone in seminary tells you otherwise, but if Genesis is a lie, then there is no faith.

I disagree. Period.

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Read the Bible prayerfully.For a wealth of sound theology, go to John 3:16.
(My wife and I are very much in love, by the way.)
I don't like extremes of temperature. I don't like extremes among preachers. People maybe think I'm extreme.But never mind about me
A true Christian is different, and the world will notice the difference.Even your tattoo, if it's faith related, it's different!

Seminar paper, not seminary. Nobody told me about Adam and Israel, I discovered it while I was writing a paper on Genesis 2-3 and going through Deuteronomy in my devotional reading at the same time. After the fact, I found out that two scholars, Norbert Lohfink (in 1965) and Otto Eckart (in 1996) had both discovered the same thing independently.

And, I think Genesis 2-3 is anything but a lie. Whatever it's relation to history, it is absolutely true. Do you think the Scarlet Letter, The Crucible or The Chronicles of Narnia are all lies? I think they're some of the truest stories ever told.

I'm not automatically saying that the Eden narrative is fiction like the above works (though The Crucible is based loosely on historical events), I'm just saying all that matters to me is the text that made it onto the page. I really couldn't care less about empirical realities in the beginning of history except as a matter of curiosity.

Assuming you meant "If Genesis 2-3 is fiction, then there is no faith," I would ask you to explain on what grounds. I haven't found any yet, but I have probably overlooked some things.

Interestingly, that statement would disqualify C. S. Lewis from the faith. hmm...

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http://biblerants.blogspot.com

Hebrews chapter 11 has the answer. "By faith we believe that the worlds were framed." and the theme of faith is carried through the rest of the chapter.

_________________
Read the Bible prayerfully.For a wealth of sound theology, go to John 3:16.
(My wife and I are very much in love, by the way.)
I don't like extremes of temperature. I don't like extremes among preachers. People maybe think I'm extreme.But never mind about me
A true Christian is different, and the world will notice the difference.Even your tattoo, if it's faith related, it's different!

I believe that God created the world with a word (or several words, as the case may be). I don't see what this has to do with Genesis 2-3 being fiction or history, or perhaps 'historical fiction.'

But yes, I think most people who believe in God, even those who promote theistic evolution (which I do not), believe he created the world, one way or another. This isn't really at odds with Hebrews 11, so far as I can see.

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http://biblerants.blogspot.com

I think I am in agreement with most here and say the author does not support conclusively his argument.

There is a tremendous amount to learn from the Adam and Eve story without it having to be historical and I use it a lot in talking with agnostics.

Paul puts the cause of death on “we all sin” and not Adam sinned so we die.

I see children as being “sinless” by the definition of sin.

As far as A&E being the first humans and we all being descendent of A&E, I have no problem and since Paul did speak as if they were historical figures, it is most likely they were.

As far as the geological record, God has provided us with the need for faith and we are not going to know God has to exist through scientific knowledge.

No, I disagree.

1 Cor. 15:22 says:

"...as in Adam all die..."

_________________
Read the Bible prayerfully.For a wealth of sound theology, go to John 3:16.
(My wife and I are very much in love, by the way.)
I don't like extremes of temperature. I don't like extremes among preachers. People maybe think I'm extreme.But never mind about me
A true Christian is different, and the world will notice the difference.Even your tattoo, if it's faith related, it's different!

It seems to me that the article took far too long to get to the point and in fact appeared to completely skip the real point, which I believe is this: Which came first - sin or death?

Either sin caused death or it did not. If death came before sin, sin cannot be the cause. If sin isn't the cause of death, you can chuck the whole New Testament along with Genesis. God is irrelevant or non-existent.

OR... Genesis is factually accurate and God really is running the show. Believe and obey or stay in sin and face the consequence. Choose this day who you will serve - human philosophy or divine revelation. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Physical death has been around a long time, long before man.
Spiritual death, separation from God, is caused by sin.

If "Genesis is factually accurate" is necessary or we "chuck the whole New Testament along with Genesis," then why isn't factual accuracy of everything Jesus said necessary or we abandon faith?

Figurative language is one way God communicates with us. We cannot demand that He meet our preferred communication formats. Serving the Lord means includes accepting what He gives us how He gives it.

As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord whether He communicates with us in Western, encyclopedia-type terms or in figurative language.

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Cobra (the car, not the poisonous reptile)
all scripture is NRSV unless otherwise noted

Could not agree more on this statement, it astonishes me why one would even be a christian if they do not believe in the basics. Is it a truth or just another philosophy book?



Amen to that

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http://christianfindings.wordpress.com/
http://www.housechurchbrisbane.com/
Favourite verse John 7:37-39

If the first Adam was not a historical figure, why should we expect people to believe that the last Adam was. When Christian attempt to allegorize Genesis to conform the Bible to what the world teaches, they are undermining the doctrine of original sin and the gospel itself.

In the Genesis account of Creation, sin resulted in death and sin came before death. In evolution, death becomes the vehicle for life and death precedes original sin. The two accounts cannot be reconciled.

Because the New Testament scriptures record Jesus as a historical figure. John writes as an eyewitness. Luke interviewed eyewitnesses.

In Genesis, on the other hand, we have two different stories about Adam's creation with different chronologies. The first ends in Genesis 2.4a and the second begins in Genesis 2.4b. The first says man was created after the plants and animals. The second says man was created before the plants and animals. Both cannot be literal history.

So we have evidence right in the scriptures that we are not to take the first chapters of Genesis literally.

_________________
Cobra (the car, not the poisonous reptile)
all scripture is NRSV unless otherwise noted

There are not two different chronologies.

Genesis 2:19 reads:

Gen 2:19 Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.

"Had formed" implies a past event.

Yes, some translators recognized the difference in chronology and tried to reconcile them by rewording the second creation story. But that attempt fails both the context and the language.

The NET Bible notes are helpful:

But you don't have to be a Hebrew scholar to see that man was alone so God formed the animals. Just read the story.
Man was alone, so God formed the animals in search of a partner. The animals were brought one by one, but no partner was found.

The NET Bible notes are also helpful in showing that man was created before there were any plants:

_________________
Cobra (the car, not the poisonous reptile)
all scripture is NRSV unless otherwise noted

Genesis chapter two gives ample evidence that the verbs in v8 and 19 are to be understood as a recap of earlier events.
Hebrew doesn’t have a pluperfect verb form. It just uses the perfect, or the equivalent vav consecutive imperfect, and lets the context tell you the chronology.

“The criteria for an unmarked overlay are not present here.” Sure they are.
The criteria expected are 1) repetition of a word or phrase to form a sort of parentheses around the discursion. As we have in Genesis 2.
Take a look at verse 8, God put Adam in the garden. Then we have several verses describing the creation of plants and trees, and then in verse 15, God puts Adam in the garden again. So the planting of the garden was a discursion, an aside or recap.
Then in verse 18 God says that there is no suitable helper for Adam. We then have the creation of animals, the naming of the animals by Adam, and then in verse 20 he repeats that there was no suitable helper for Adam. Although not everything in verse 19 happened before God spoke the words in verse 18 (just the creation of animals did), the whole verse is a discursion that explains how God demonstrated to Adam the fact that, unlike the animals that were all matched, male and female, he was all alone.

The second criterion is that logical necessity or common cultural experience would give someone a reason to understand that a discursion is explanatory.
If Moses has already told us that plants and animals were formed before man, then any subsequent reference to their creation can very simply and logically be understood as a recap, and therefore as a pluperfect in English. It’s only because your scholars reject Moses as the author of both Genesis 1 and 2, that they don’t find the logical necessity that would have been obvious to Moses’ readers.
As a third indicator, I would point to the statement in 2:4, “This is the account of the heavens and the earth.” The ten “accounts” or toledot of Genesis usually start with a recap or overview or a discursion that’s not technically in chronological order.

The statement in 2:5 that there were not any plants is, as the NET notes say, a disjunctive background statement. It’s not background to the creation of man (as the translation makes it sound, as if plants still did not exist when man was created), but rather, background information to the whole narrative of the creation of the garden of Eden. I would translate something like this: “When the Lord God made the heavens and the earth (before this there were no shrubs or plants of the field...) and when the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground..., the Lord God planted a garden...”
The clause mentioning man is still stating the general time that Moses is talking about. It’s not attempting to insert the creation of man in between the plantless time and the garden’s beginning.