Re: Days of Proclamation

Glenn Morton wrote:

" I see absolutely no reason to believe in a God who has no idea how
the earth was created or who has no ability to tell his followers how it was
created. If he has no ability to tell about the creation (which is
verifiable), I see no reason to trust his revelations on theology which are
not verifiable. To me, such a god is not a god; he is a delusion."

I think I can understand where you're coming from. As a child and young man I also was a YEC and for a short time even a YEC extremist. But all that ended more than 40 years ago.

While my personal theology originally was almost exclusively Bible-based, after profound "religious experiences" it became dominantly God-based, and I attribute my abandonment of YEC directly to the personal relationship with God. It has become impossible for me to seriously entertain YEC views, and to argue against them seems mostly like a waste of breath. (But I'm glad that you and others are making the effort, and I strongly encourage you to continue as long as you are moved to do so. This is partly because I recognize that I'm likely to be irrelevant to any YEC.)

Now, unlike you, I can't not believe in God. For me to discover that the Bible was largely fairytale would have little effect on my faith in God.

However, from the personal relationship I know God but very little about God. What he can or cannot do in general is totally beyond my knowing. Despite this lack of information, I know God is greater than I, and I have put my unquestioning trust in him.

The Bible is still very important. It brought me to the personal relationship with God to begin with, and I see in it a partial history of God's activities in the world. I trust the validity of the overall historical sequences partly because several of them have personal meaning for me but mostly because they are consistent with God as I know him. So I accept and value the Bible because I see that it comes from God. My acceptance of God, in contrast, no longer depends on the Bible.

Some of the Bible's details, however, do not seem compatible with God as I know him. For example, much of Leviticus seems alien and uncharacteristic of God. In order for me to accept such details as being from God, I have to apply a thick layer of interpretation: God was the God of Leviticus in Moses' day because the people of Moses' day were different from us, and God could not have dealt effectively with them in any other than the Leviticus way.

(Here's one piece of evidence that people really were different then: their craving for foreign gods. Although Christians today often describe idolatry as any behavior that puts creature ahead of Creator, OT idolatry is qualitatively different. The OT often characterizes the craving for foreign gods as sexual in nature (e.g., Ezekiel 16,23). People's lust for gods back then was not like a man's skipping church now to play golf or do his tax return.)

Your relationship to the Bible now is very different from mine. You make strong demands of it. I don't demand much of the Bible, although I highly value the gems it contains. I don't know whether God is able to give us a scientific description of the creation or not; and even if he could not, I'd not respect him less. My relationship with God has nothing to do with whether or not he can perform certain tricks. What I'm confident of is that a scientific description of creation does not appear in the Bible.

Your comment on "delusion" is interesting. I think history would have judged Jesus to be delusional had it not been for his miracles. What I have to say is loony, and people would no doubt judge me to be delusional if I came out with it, as I was planning to do about a year ago. To avoid that verdict I'm afraid I may have to wait until I can work an impressive miracle or two!

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Glenn Morton<mailto:glennmorton@entouch.net>
  To: Don Winterstein<mailto:dfwinterstein@msn.com> ; asa<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2004 8:07 PM
  Subject: RE: Days of Proclamation

  Hi Don, you wrote:

>-----Original Message-----
>From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu<mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu> [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu]On
  Behalf Of Don Winterstein
>Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 6:44 PM
>
> DW: I have no doubt that the author intended that "day" here should mean a
  particular, isolated increment of time (not
>necessarily 24h). This conviction does not come from imposing modern
  literary criticism on an ancient text. Such meaning,
>I think, would come through clearly to ingenuous readers in any language of
  any time. The text is as unsubtle and
>straightforward as can be. Why the author felt the creating should have
  been broken up into precisely those increments is
>obscure.

  I am convinced that the only way to entice YECs out of their position
  without driving them to atheism is to offer them an interpretation of the
  bible which maintains historicity and which allows the acceptance of
  science. The Days of Proclamation theory was what kept me in the faith when
  I left YEC. If I had had your view, I would now be an atheist. Of that I
  have absolutely no doubt. Indeed, one person who is prominent in the ASA
  spent some time during one of crises nursing me back to faith.

  I tell you that to note that I really don't care whether or not you find the
  days or proclamation useful. It was posted because of Jack Syme's request.
  It wasn't meant for you at all. Unfortunately, it seems that jack has
  disappeared, so I got no feed back from him.

  And as I have said many times on this board, if there is no historicity in
  the early part of scripture, ( George, Burgy and I have argued this
  territory many a time although George's form of historicity is not one I can
  accept), I see absolutely no reason to believe in a God who has no idea how
  the earth was created or who has no ability to tell his followers how it was
  created. If he has no ability to tell about the creation (which is
  verifiable), I see no reason to trust his revelations on theology which are
  not verifiable. To me, such a god is not a god; he is a delusion.
Received on Sat Feb 14 06:37:27 2004