| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

What About Genesis, Chapter One

This version was saved 9 years, 5 months ago View current version     Page history
Saved by pinkhamc@...
on October 6, 2014 at 11:56:11 am
 

Two books that you should read as you study Genesis, Chapter One are "The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate" by John Walton, and the booklet, Genesis One and the Age of the Earth" by Rodney Whitefield, or the longer version, "Reading Genesis One: Comparing Biblical Hebrew with English Translation."

 

In a nutshell, here's the problem. One cannot hope to translate any foreign work accurately until one has thoroughly grasped other writings penned at the same time in the same language and the cultural milieu at the time of their writing.  Genesis One was understood in this manner by the middle of the 19th century and this understanding was so widespread, that no one saw a need to include it in Seminary courses in America. As a result, shortly after Darwin's "Origin of Species" appeared, Certain American Evangelistic movements began to see (erroneously) that an old earth threatened Biblical credibility. These books return their reader to the original Hebrew in the original culture at the time that Moses (and his "muse," the Holy Spirit) wrote Genesis to correct this misunderstanding.

 

Both of them review the meanings associated with the Hebrew words and phrases "bara" and "asa", "tohu and bohu", and "yom."  Genesis One cannot be appreciated or understood until these words are comprehended in the sense and setting in which they were originally used.

 

An additional good read that relates more specifically to understanding the cosomology of the time which provided the setting for Moses' writing, is Denis Lamoureux's excellent book, "Evolutionary Creationism: A Christian Approach to Evolution," or the shorter, more readable, "I Love Jesus & I Accept Evolution."

 

Accommodation

Denis first introduced me to the concept of "accommodation."  Fundamentally, it is that God comes down to the level of knowledge possessed by the author of a particular Biblical book to convey the truth He is revealing.  God uses words, terms, and concepts familiar to the author (and his audience at the time of his writing) as symbols.  God is not so concerned with the whether the symbols accurately represent physical truth; He is concerned that they accurately convey spiritual truth.

 

I take this concept one step further than Denis and many of my colleagues in ASA.  I reason that if God is all-knowing and able to influence the thoughts of man, than He must have influenced the thoughts of the cosmologists of the time so that their physical view of the heavens and earth, although not physically correct, was correct enough that it could be recognized by us with our current knowledge (and a willingness to uncover the metaphor) to convey the physical truth accurately.

 

Adam and Eve

This is just a short thought I discovered today (14 10 06) going through some old notes-don't want to lose it so I'm leaving it here.  Romans 5:12 tells us that sin entered the world through one man.  In other words, it probably occurred as a mutation (or a family of mutations) that when completed, created the sin nature that we have been inheriting ever since.  To do so, it must have also created a strong, positive selection coefficient.  So strong that the mutation has been protected ever since.  What could that be?  Perhaps it is simply the awareness of self to the extent that we also recognize that others have a self awareness like ours and thus have every right to have their awareness of self favored just as much as we want ours favored.  That would inevitably create situations when we would favor an action that pampered our self awareness at the expense of someone Else's.  That would be sin-even to the point of being the original sin.

 

Return to Mentiscopia

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.