Dick Fischer wrote:
" Genesis was written for the children of Israel. It is
about their walk with God, their failings, their triumphs, their history,
their beginnings. It is not about the beginnings of humanity as we
somehow
have come to believe."
OK, I understood you to have claimed this. And, I admit, it does make a
lot of sense. What it does NOT do is answer my question -- just when did
Imago Dei first appear?
I can see most questions to origins problems as being answered by appeals
to processes. When does a fetus become a human being? That is a process
(even the "event" of sperm-egg implantation is a process), and so the
question cannot, even in principle, be answered by pointing to a point of
time, or a point of the process.
But either an organism IS Imago Dei or it is not. I can't see a process
here.
"We Christians made one small mistake. We knew that Adam was the father
of
the Jews, the Arabs, the Armenians and some others. We knew he was the
first type of Christ, the first man to have a covenant relationship with
God, and that he was the first to sin and suffer consequences. But we
also
thought that Adam was the first mammalian biped with an opposable thumb
and
a cranial capacity of 1400 to 1500 cubic centimeters. He was not. His
entry was too late for that."
I understand you here.
"Adam’s mission apparently was to make the world aware that we had a
loving,
caring, heavenly Father. Adam was a man, created in the image of God,
who
would have brought mankind into a relationship with the Creator. But we
thought Adam was created to people the planet. We tried to draw our
four
million year-old family tree beginning with a man who lived about 7,000
years ago! No matter how you draw it, it doesn’t work. And this has
been
the common mistake of Christian apologists down through the centuries -
including this one we just started."
I understand you here also.
"But Burgy had expressed a preference for your method of apology over
mine. I want to see if he is prepared to live with the liabilities."
I'm not at all sure what those liabilities are. What I see as a result of
reading (and helping to edit) Glenn's last book rather carefully is that
IMAGO DEI lived a lot longer than 7,000 years ago. IMHO, he has made that
case rather well. His identification of a creature 2-4 MY ago with the
Adam of Genesis I don't find credible, but that identification is not of
much interest to me, so I have not concentrated on it. The Adam of
Genesis may well be much closer to your view.
Burgy
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