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

I too am withdrawing from the thread, slowly. My comments follow Phils.

"Hi drsyme (I'm sorry I don't know your name. David if I recall?)"

No I am Jack.
"I think you may have combined me with one or two other people because I didn't say or agree to all of these things. Is that possible?"

No I was referring to the post below my original post. For example: "(I think it possible that the author of II Peter may also have been accustomed to hyperbolic speech, too, ...)" "But this process involves primarily a recognition of the **literary** features of the text, so that we don't take things too literally where we shouldn't. The text is no more literal than the author meant it to be (nor any less). " "But I would tend to agree with George that primarily we need to be sensitive to the literary features because the authors were writing in a different era than ours and they were communicating primarily theology. " "According to these sources, the author -- and apparently it is not clear that Peter actually was the author -- borowed heavily from contemporary Jewish eschatology, reflected in sources like Enoch and Josephus -- that had transmorgified the Bible's account of the flood as an event affecting only the earth into an event affecting the entire universe. Thus, the author would have concieved of the history of the universe in three stages -- created / completely destroyed / and re-created, with another eschatological complete destruction and re-creation coming. These commentaries seem to suggest that the teaching we're intended to glean from this letter isn't the specific underlying cosmology, but the fact that God has judged in the past and will surely return to judge as Christ promised, despite the perplexing delay in his return. Very interesting and tricky hermeneutical issues raised by all of this. "

Actually, my first argument to George was that the writer of II Peter did **not** see the flood as being universal. His careful switching back and forth between "earth" and "kosmos" indicates he did not see the flood as a destruction of the actual earth, but rather as a destruction of the civilization that lived on the earth. "kosmos" could refer to the people, whereas the word for "earth" could not. So when he suddently switched to "kosmos" instead of earth it shows that he understood that the flood did not destroy the actual earth. All the flood did was make it temporarily wet (and kill the people and animals). However, when the author moves from discussing the flood back to discussing the heavens & earth, he drops the term "kosmos" and goes back to the actual word for earth ("land"). So it seems to me that he was claiming that the future will bring a judgement that is qualitatively different than the flood. The sudden inco nsistency of terms would be inexplicable unless he was consciously aware of this distinction. Therefore, I see the text as making a comparison in that both are examples of sudden judgment, but it also clearly acknowledging a contrast.

And my point is just that if the passage regarding the "heavens and earth" is not meant as a literal destruction of the world, then it does not help us to understand what the author meant by the geographical extent of the flood. The author may or may not have understood the extent of the flood, I do not think that this passage is about that.

My second argument added to this because I pointed out that the author's use of univeralist language was consistent with the hyperbole we we see in both the OT and NT, and therefore is not necessarily an indicator that he really thought it was universal.

And neither was the language about the heavens and earth.

I understand that most times in the OT when it uses language about the stars going dark, etc., it was purely poetic and figurative to indicate a political shake-up in human civilization. But I don't think the presence of that kind of usage necessarily goes far enough to support the preterist or post millenial view(s). It would take me a long time to go back and look at that to see why I drew those conclusions because I have not thought about it for many years. I'm either a-mil or historic pre-mil, but undecided between them. It's not something that interests me enough to work on it, and I can respect the viewpoint of folks who are post-mil. I'm more interested in understanding the past than the future, right now.

I am impressed with your knowledge, and the intelligence of your posts. It is really a shame that you are not interested in eschatology, in my opinion our understanding of the end is related to our understanding of the beginning. I gave a few references in the thread from Christ, from Hebrews, from Haggai that I think indicate that the language used in Peter are similar, and that they are figurative and indicate that heavens and earth means the old covenant, etc. My agenda is to point out that people may have presuppostions about eschatology that maybe are not correct. Preterism might not be correct. But it is consistent. I think that if we approach apocalyptic literature free from our futurist presuppositions, we might gain new insight into passages like this, but II Peter alone is not enough evidence to make a determination one way or the other.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Sun Apr 1 18:40:54 2007