Re: [asa] Does ASA believe in Adam and Eve?

*George said: I do not think that the biblical writers - of Genesis or II
Peter - had any idea about a a flood which destroyed some human beings but
left others unscathed. The table of the nations in Gen.10 was intended to
include the whole inhabited world as the author & his culture knew it.*
**
I think I agree with you here that this seems to be the most natural reading
of the text -- though Phil and Dick have pointed out some interesting
reasons in this and other threads why this might not be so.

But even granting this, it seems to me that we could still say that the
Bible writers can't be taken to have been making any comment about whether
the flood affected people they didn't know existed -- people in Australia
and North America and such. Or to put it more transparently from my
hermeneutical perspective: it would not be "error" if Moses / Peter's
universal language about the flood is "disproved" by the existence of people
in other parts of the world, which the writers wouldn't have known
about, who weren't affected by it. This approach, of course, creates many
big problems of its own -- particularly that the flood would have had to
occurred well before historical times, and even then it's difficult to fit
it into any plausible chronology of human migration. So, personally, I have
to recognize this as a point of tension that I can't resolve, while thinking
more deeply about my hermeneutical presuppositions.

Along those hermeneutical lines, I wonder to what extent my Western,
rationalist cultural baggage affects what I percieve to be the most
"natural" or "plain" reading of texts like these, and likewise how that
baggage affects my ideas about what the most "straightforward" or
"reasonable" explanation for the Biblical phenomena are. Being raised and
educated in the milieu of Enlightenment skepticism my first response to any
claim is doubt: "that can't be right;" "prove it!" And, I'm conditioned to
read most texts in a very simple, common-sense realist way: it says what it
says at face vale, and if the face value statement is wrong, the text's
claims are bogus.

I'm not really so convinced anymore that this is always the best way to
approach the phenomena scripture. I've been influenced in recent years by
left-evangelical / post-evangelical theologians such as Stan Grenz and
Donald Bloesch, most of whom have been influenced in varying degrees by
Barth, and who tend emphasize the role of the community in
continually receiving and understanding the text afresh as the Holy Spirit
speaks in and through the text to the Church.

It may very well be that what we take as the "face value" or "common sense
reading" of a text like 2 Peter is not at all what would have appeared
common-sensical to the original hearers in a Second Temple Judaism cultural
and hermeneutical context; and it may be that the Holy Spirit is asking us
to understand the text in fresh ways today in our modern / post-modern
context. I want to retain the notion of scripture as fully truthful and
"without error" as a theological proposition the Church has consistently
embraced, stemming from a foundational belief in God's truthful character,
but to strip from this notion our Western rationalist skepticism and our
overly precise views about the nature of language. Given that, I'm a little
more open to the view that a text like 2 Peter might echo some background
cultural assumptions about the flood without necessarily authoritatively
communicating those background assumptions to the Church "in error."

**

On 3/30/07, George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com> wrote:
>
> Boy, get up at 5:15 a.m. & you still have 3 posts waiting for you in the
> same thread! I should have bundled these responses. & with Holy Week &
> Easter fast approaching, I'm going to have to drop out of this pretty soon.
> But -
>
> You make an intersting point below about the word usage in II Peter 3 but
> I don't think it will bear the weight. *kosmos* does indeed sometimes
> have the sense of "the world as the habitation of mankind" (BAG) & even more
> limited meanings, but the 1st sense is the totality of everything - the way
> in which we use the word "cosmos" today. In any case there is an
> implication of totality - if it refers to humanity it means all humans, not
> a subset.
>
> II Peter does say literally that the world, not the earth, was destroyed
> in the flood. But that has to be qualified by noting the
> distinction between "heavens that existed long ago" and "an earth" of v.5and "the present heavens and earth" of
> v.7. This sounds as if "the present heavens and earth" are different from
> the former ones.
>
> But here I think is the bottom line. The real issue is not so much the
> cosmological or geographical extent of the flood but its anthropological
> extent. Historians may correct me if I'm wrong but the emphasis on supposed
> geological evidence for a worldwide flood is largely an artifact of recent
> "flood geology" partisans. While I think the biblical authors do have a
> worldwide flood in view - world as they understood it - their emphasis is
> on its impact on humanity. All of humanity - *kosmos* in the sense you
> cite. The flood was understood to be worldwide in the sense that it wiped
> out all people except Noah & his family, just as (in II Peter) the coming
> destruction of the world - & yes, judgment - will affect all people. I do
> not think that the biblical writers - of Genesis or II Peter - had any idea
> about a a flood which destroyed some human beings but left others
> unscathed. The table of the nations in Gen.10 was intended to include the
> whole inhabited world as the author & his culture knew it.
>
> Shalom
> George
> http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* philtill@aol.com
> *To:* gmurphy@raex.com ; asa@calvin.edu ; dopderbeck@gmail.com
> *Sent:* Friday, March 30, 2007 1:38 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [asa] Does ASA believe in Adam and Eve?
>
>
> George,
> you wrote:
>
>
> ...The author counters by pointing to the flood in order to show that
> "the heavens and earth" - the whole world - can be destroyed. I do not see
> how that language about the coming destruction can reasonably be understood
> as less than universal. My original point was that this appeal to the flood
> would carry no weight in this argument if the flood were not understood by
> the author & his readers to have a similar scope.
>
> That is a clever and interesting argument!
>
> However, the author does make an important distinction between Noah's
> flood and the future calamity: he carefully distinguishes the terms "earth"
> (the actual ground) and "kosmos" (a reference to Noah's civilization). You
> swap uses of those terms in your statement above. I believe the author's
> clear distinction between them undermines your argument.
>
> 1. He reminds us first that God does control the "earth" (land) because
> it was under water and then he brought it out.
>
> 2. Then he reminds us that God destroyed the "world" (kosmos) in Noah's
> day. Note that the "earth" itself survived the flood. It would have been
> unintelligible to say that a flood actually destroyed the earth, when he
> just got finished saying that the earth had been under water once before
> during creation! So he avoided the word "earth" and correctly switched to
> the world "kosmos" to say what God destroyed in the Flood.
>
> 3. Then he asserts that the present heavens and "earth" (land again, not
> kosmos) are being reserved for a complete meltdown of the elements. That is
> not the same kind of calamity that happened in Noah's day, it is much
> greater! The future calamity will destroy the actual earth -- the very
> ground beneath us, and not just the people (kosmos) who walk on it.
>
> Your argument was:
>
> 1. If the flood was a lesser scope than the future calamity, then it
> fails to prove God's ability to deliver, and thus the author's
> argument would be unintelligible
> 2. The author would not have said things that are unintelligible
> 3. Therefore he must have believed that the flood was not a lesser scope
> than the future calamity
>
> But I believe your #1 is wrong. As I showed above the author clearly did
> know that the Flood was of a much lesser scope, and clearly he was not
> bothered by it. The complete melting of the elements of the earth -- and of
> the heavens as well -- is surely a bigger event than a mere Flood of any
> size! This non-equivalency of scope (completely destroying versus merely
> flooding) is different than the non-equivalency that you were discussing
> (universality vs. non-universality), but in terms of demonstrating God's
> capabilities it is in fact a much greater non-equivalency than the one you
> were discussing.
>
> So the claim that the flood must be equivalent in scope to the future
> destruction of heavens and earth OR ELSE the author's argument must be
> unintelligible is (IMO) weakened and not sufficiently strong to carry the
> point.
>
> I gladly admit that I'm motivated by my belief in inerrancy as a
> theological hermeneutic! :-)
>
> God bless!
> Phil
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: gmurphy@raex.com
> To: drsyme@cablespeed.com; dopderbeck@gmail.com
> Cc: asa@calvin.edu
> Sent: Thu, 29 Mar 2007 9:25 PM
> Subject: Re: [asa] Does ASA believe in Adam and Eve?
>
> Yes, v.7 refers to the day of judgment. What I said a couple of posts
> ago was 'that "judgment" is not the primary theme of II Peter 3:1-10.' I
> have not denied that the destruction of the world is connected with
> judgment. & I should not have said "it's not about judgment at all" - an
> exaggerated statement in response to repeated arguments which made the text
> *entirely* about judgment.
>
> The argument of the scoffers in Ch.3 is that the world has gone on without
> change from the beginning of creation & therefore the promise of Christ's
> coming is foolish. The author counters by pointing to the flood in order to
> show that "the heavens and earth" - the whole world - can be destroyed. I
> do not see how that language about the coming destruction can reasonably be
> understood as less than universal. My original point was that this appeal
> to the flood would carry no weight in this argument if the flood were not
> understood by the author & his readers to have a similar scope.
>
> That's it. It seems to me a straightforward argument & if it defies
> common sense then I don't know what common sense is. & the extent to which
> this destruction is connected with judgment doesn't change the argument.
>
> The reason judgment got to be front & center in this discussion is that
> David tried to use it to make a connection with the local character of the
> destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. But that assumes (a) that judgment is
> the key idea in Ch.3, which it isn't & (b) that Ch.3 is dealing with the
> same scoffers as in Ch.2, & it isn't.
>
> But let me ask this: Is the reason why several of you are arguing that
> the author of II Peter didn't think the flood was universal just that you
> don't want to have to say that he was wrong about that? Or is there another
> reason?
>
> Shalom
> George
> http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Jack <drsyme@cablespeed.com>
> *To:* George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com> ; David Opderbeck<dopderbeck@gmail.com>
> *Cc:* ASA list <asa@calvin.edu>
> *Sent:* Thursday, March 29, 2007 6:43 PM
> *Subject:* Re: [asa] Does ASA believe in Adam and Eve?
>
>
> George, this was your quote that started this portion of the thread: "To
> note just one point, the way in which II Peter 3:5-7 uses the story of the
> flood to argue for the possibility of the destruction of "the present
> heavens and earth" makes no sense if the writer of II Peter did not think of
> the flood as affecting the whole world."
>
> Did you forget that we were talking about v 5-7, not just verse 4?
>
> v7 "By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire,
> being kept for the day of *judgment *and destruction of ungodly men."
> (NIV)
>
> The KJV, NAS, new KJV also all use the word judgment. I doubt you think
> that all of those translators are wrong, so you must be trying to make some
> obscure point, that has deviated from your original point. This passage is
> clearly about judgment. Despite the appearance of being erudite, it is
> getting to the point where your posts defy common sense.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com>
> *To:* David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>
> *Cc:* ASA list <asa@calvin.edu>
> *Sent:* Thursday, March 29, 2007 8:12 PM
> *Subject:* Re: [asa] Does ASA believe in Adam and Eve?
>
>
> 1) You apparently don't know the difference between what a biblical text
> says & theological deductions drawn from it.
>
> 2) It should have given you some pause when I had to point out that you'd
> misquoted the text to bring the word "judgment" into it. You apparently had
> formed your interpretation of the text before reading it carefully. You
> ought to practice a little introspective *Tendenzkritik*.
>
> Shalom
> George
> http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
>
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Received on Fri Mar 30 08:53:42 2007