--- Walter Hicks <wallyshoes@mindspring.com> wrote:
(snip)
> Anyhow, if is not history, then in my mind it is
> simply an _error_ --
> not a myth or theology. It is pretty clear that if
> you read Genesis
> backwards you are looking at what someone _thought_
> was the history of
> mankind. If he was wrong, then the Bible in that
> area is simply wrong.
> If it has myths taken from others, then it is not
> much better than the
> myths from which is was taken. Trying to patch it up
> with "theology" is
> somewhat fakery in my mind. If the author was just
> telling stories, they
> would not be laced all the begats and who lived how
> long IMO.
Well, not necessarily.
Here is my first disclaimer. I am not saying that
Genesis is necessarily untrue in an historical sense.
What I am saying is that whether or not every aspect
of it is literally true does not matter one fig to
Christian faith or the vast majority of church dogma,
so we should not get caught up on it as either a
stumbling block or something that is necessary to
bring into concord for the purpose of apologetics.
Heck, the great apologist CS Lewis did not believe the
story of Adam to be literally true.
It simply does not matter to the central core of
Christian faith, it is a tangent. It may be literally
true, it may not be. If it isn't that does not mean
that Jesus is not the Christ.
> I don't have the hangup that many have and have to
> insist that the first
> part of Bible has any divine inspiration at all. It
> would simply be an
> error if it is a bunch of co-opted myths with the
> number of "gods"
> reduced to one.
I think the argument is that the Jews used the myths
of surrounding cultures and reworked them to explain
YHWH. In this sense, I think Genesis is at least an
apologetic that says something true about the one true
God that the other myths missed.
>
> My inclination is to accept Genesis for what most
> people think that it
> is -- history. If I become convinced that it is
> mythology (and it sure
> doesn't look like it me), then I'll just stop paying
> any attention to
> it.
Well, whether it is myth or not does not affect the
status of Jesus has been my only point.
> You know, as matter of fact, I never really did pay
> much attention to it
> before joining this list. It is only on the ASA
> posts that it constantly
> comes up in my experience. (of course I don't live
> in YEC City either.)
And, I think this is healthy. Christianity is
primarily about Jesus as a revelation of God's nature
and love.
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