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

You are right! I apologize. I somehow thought that post from you, even though I knew it was two different posts, were both by you, sorry for the confusion.

But I must ask you, are you expecting a complete destruction of the Earth, and of the universe? Other than this passage, what makes you think that is necessary? What exactly do you see as the effects of the fall? Does this extend to all created things, or is creation going about its way, just as it always has, and the fall and original sin, applies specifically, and exclusively, to humans? In other words, God called creation good, and it is still good. The effects of the fall are limited to humans, and there is no need for all of creation to be redeemed. Death, disease, carnivorism, all existed prior to Adam, and the fall did not change any of that.
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: philtill@aol.com
  To: drsyme@cablespeed.com ; asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Sunday, April 01, 2007 8:54 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] Does ASA believe in Adam and Eve?

  Hi, Jack,

  Aha! So you were combining me with another person! Half of what you quoted was mine, and half was from David O. That's OK, though, because I usually agree very closely with David. :-)

  Well, I did read a book by Gary DeMar about 10 years ago. He is a preterist and was arguing heavily for full preterism. I was not convinced because I couldn't see how the zealot leader holed up in the temple during the Roman siege could make sense out of what Paul was saying in 2 Thess about the anti-christ's appearance and how Christians should interpret the times. But nevertheless i am sure that many of the NT passages were literally fulfilled in 70 A.D. and that answers many of the objections about 1st century eschatology.

  Here is what guides most of my view on eschatology. Compare the chapters in Daniel where Antiochus Epiphanes is in view as the little horn speaking blasphemies and persecuting the Jews. Then note that in an adjacent chapter there is another horn acting very similarly, but there is no reasonable way to make him out to be Antiochus Epiphanes. Instead, it surely must be a reference to a Roman (or future) person. The parallels between the two are striking, but at the end of the day I had to conclude that they were not the same person and that God set up the parallel on purpose. I think that prophecies are often that way. There are parallel events and that God intended there to be opportunity for people to deny the future fulfillment by claiming it was a reference to the past one.

  Another example of this is the suffering servant in Isaiah. The Jewish scholars today argue that this is a reference only the the Jews, or to a subset of the Jews, but if you follow the author's method of contrasting his servant with the Jewish people you can see that clearly it must be a special servant who comes in the future (from Isaiah's vantage point) to fulfill the mission of the Jews where they had failed. So the parallel between the Jews and the future Messiah provide positive deniability so that nobody is forced to believe.

  So I see prophecy as providing encouragement to those who are willing to believe, but because it is usually set in parallels it never forces anyone to believe.

  Applying this to the NT, I see that God did fulfill a parallel to the parousia when He destroyed the temple in 70 A.D., but that this was not the total fulfillment. There would be a future parousia when Christ literally returns.

  That's why I never adopted full preterism. I felt like it was falling for the parallel as if it were the complete fulfillment.

  I think we can see the Flood in similar terms. God promised (through Lamech) the coming of a saviour who would bring rest to His people. That prophecy was fulfilled in Noah his son. But Noah was also a parallel of the future saviour. So this parallellism is found all throughout the record of revelation.

  I appreciate your points about needing to address eschatology in order to properly interpret the past. I guess I had not fully appreciated that before and will need to take another look.

  (By the way, I'm sure that the person who originally posted the question about Adam and Eve is very frustrated by the tangents that this has taken, but in reality this is all very germaine to the question because we have all been arguing the very things that cause us to adopt our own views on Adam and Eve, although we have not always stated the connection explicitely.)

  God bless!
  Phil

   
  -----Original Message-----
  From: drsyme@cablespeed.com
  To: dopderbeck@gmail.com; philtill@aol.com
  Cc: gmurphy@raex.com; asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Sun, 1 Apr 2007 6:40 PM
  Subject: 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.

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Received on Sun Apr 1 22:29:27 2007