RE: CT article: Darwinists, not Christians, stonewalling the facts

At 08:53 AM 3/31/2005, Glenn Morton wrote:
>I read that article and it verifies something that I have said recently
>in the YECs have won thread. The ASA has almost zero influence in the
>Christian community today. It is for the same reason that the YEC
>churches are growing and the more mainline/liberal ones aren't. People
>in general don't see a way to avoid the concept that God is capable of
>creating a universe and then communicating what he actually did. A God
>who can't do the two things above, isn't very powerful. Today, most
>members of the ASA don't put enough historicity into Genesis to satify
>most of the laity. Like it or not, but don't kill me, the messenger who
>is telling y'all something you don't want to hear or believe.

Glenn, you move apparently in other circles than I do. Some here may
accept a "literal" reading of Gen.1 - 11, but most do not read the
beginning of Genesis that way. Many see in Gen. 1 for example a song from
the oldest people who could read and write. Some chapters in Gen. are seen
as the way the early people talked with God, etc. But very few see it as
history in the modern sense of the word. Add to that difficulties in
translation: (Gen. 1 "nephesh' translated as life; Gen.2 "nephesh"
translated as "soul" (and that not even in every translation.) My
denomination had a study committee about these issues. I was a member of
that committee. All of us accept that Jesus died for our sins and in that
way prepared "place" for us on the new earth to come.

The early chapters of Genesis are not history in our sense of the word, and
cannot be. Also, God is all powerful, but before the Tower of Babel there
may have been one language, after that certainly not. I am convinced that
God did not speak to the early people in a language which was vaguely
familiar to English. Many, very many, even learned people cannot read a
word of the Bible in the original.
Even the translations in different languages differ according to the
language into the Word is translated. English speaking nations have the
disadvantage that they seldom speak any foreign language, and thus often
they do not realize, that in different nations the Bible is read in a
different way, causing different theologies.

Do we say: Gen. 1-11 is not history? Maybe it sounds like that, but I
would formulate it as; Gen.1 -11 is not history in our sense of the
word. My uncle wrote in the thirties already that these chapters could and
should not be read as history IN OUR SENSE OF THE WORD. And even well
known Christian theologians in the 19th century wrote that these chapters
should not be read as a modern history book.

My main reason for writing this is that I and many others should not be
accused of what I read in Glenn's note. I find that he is not accusing us,
though we are sinners as well, but that he is accusing God for making
nature contradicting His Word. He did not, but we may not always be able
to read properly.

Jan de Koning
Received on Thu Mar 31 15:11:46 2005