The Bible

[KingKai25]

[quote]pat wrote:
The disconnect seems to be that it seems you are answering questions I am not asking. That’s what I have been finding frustrating. It’s not that I don’t understand what you are saying, it’s that what you are saying isn’t necessarily related to what I am saying.

So for instance, the whole thing about divine inspiration. I am really not concerned with how it occurred. My point was simply that the divine intent isn’t necessarily the same as the human intent. That what God had in mind, was more (or perhaps) even less than what the writer had in mind.
It doesn’t matter if the writer took dictation, fell in a trance, God came down and guided his had, or if the human and divine thoughts were commingled in the authors head as a single cohesive thought. God using man as his instrument doesn’t portend that this divine inspiration took place a certain way.
[/quote]

I disagree about the relevance of my points. The mode of inspiration has direct bearing on the appropriate hermeneutic to apply to the text. If the early church used the term “inspiration” to describe some sort of process in which the divine intent is identical the human intent, i.e., these texts communicate through the same linguistic and cultural conventions humans use to communicate with each other at a particular time and place , then my source of authority (the belief of the early church) only CLEARLY supports a reading strategy wherein the divine intent is accessed THROUGH the human. Since the early church did not believe in multiple meanings beyond those intended by the human authors, any positing of additional divine meanings unknown to the biblical authors is mere speculation.

In short, I can argue for the reading strategy I’ve adopted based on (1) the nature of language and (2) the authoritative beliefs of the earliest Christians. If you want to take their term, “inspiration,” and expand its sense to include God’s additional communication to “those in the know” by the very same words that already make sense in their original literary, cultural, and historical contexts, then the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate the legitimacy of this proposal, because there is nothing in the doctrine as they understand it that supports your expansion. It is arbitrary and speculative, no matter how many figures in the RCC or Protestantism you can recall who make the same move.

Certainly in my life, God has taken me down paths were I thought I was in control and making the decisions, but really I was just an instrument of his will. He didn’t appear to me, he didn’t dictate to me, he just took me where I needed to be by his will.
I would argue the same for divine scripture. The author had his own thoughts and purposes and was in complete control over what he was writing, but the divine will in the end made it so much more than the author could have ever imagined.
And that’s really it.

This is a much better and clearer analogy, but once again, I have to ask if this analogy fits with the way the earliest Christians understood “inspiration,” and once again, I’d have to say no. Is it possible? Sure, hypothetically. But I have too much respect for God to presume to know things about him or his operations in this world that have not been clearly revealed to us, which includes claiming that he meant something by a text other than what can be discerned through standard modes of human interpretation.

I am not pushing for anything. I am not saying the word says something the author didn’t intend. The word actually says exactly what the author intended it to say. Now that doesn’t mean that the intent of God through these writings had more in mind. Certainly, the writer of Genesis, was not aware of John Chapter 1. But John felt very compelled that before all of creation was, Jesus was. That all things were created through him.
Now the author of Genesis did not know that, unless it was revealed to him. But that doesn’t mean that the intent of God was that John 1 has something to reveal about Genesis 1, that was not previously known.
I don’t buy that subsequent scriptures do not open up more about the prior simply because the author did not have that in mind.
It may be a writer’s hand, but it’s still God’s book and he had something to say to us. The author’s may or may not have been aware of God’s full intent.

I’m sorry, Pat, but I’m not following the beginning of your argument here. It seems like your missing some particles in the above statements. Regarding the Genesis example, I can say once again that, given the nature of the composition of literary texts in the ancient world, there are two really compelling possibilities. On the one hand, Genesis 1-2 could be a hodgepodge of hastily sewn together material reflecting widely diverse perspectives on the nature of the gods, and both the use of elohim (a plural noun) and the “us” language reflects the original polytheistic contexts of these passages. This is the dominant position among secular scholars, and the fact is that, for anyone who knows Hebrew, it is highly convincing. Why would I NOT choose that position over the view that God left a completely enigmatic statement in Genesis, a statement whose meaning and purpose within the narrative was unknown to the human author and only revealed centuries later to Christians who had a copy of John’s gospel and could read it in tandem with Genesis?

But there is another possibility, and that is that the human author was following common conventions of the ancient Near Eastern “origin account” genre by supplying a subtle allusion to the heavenly council, an idea (contrary to Push’s erroneous claims) found several times throughout the Old Testament.

Perhaps our theological backgrounds are in play, but I have read many protestant analysis that also agree with what I have expressed. But in Catholic Bibles, for instance, the references to Jesus and ‘I AM’ in the Gospels are always capitalized. The point was for the reader to make, that link. Now of course I don’t know if that was expressed that way in the original texts. But that also doesn’t mean the link isn’t there.

I recognize that many Protestants would agree with your claims, but that doesn’t nullify my point - such Protestants are, in my opinion, insufficiently self-critical. They don’t see the inherent theological problem in attempting to use the canon as the standard of orthodoxy while also affirming particular Roman Catholic formulations of received doctrines as binding without explicit biblical warrant (no Tirib, this is not a jab).

And I’m not getting the relevance of Jesus’ “I Am” statements for this discussion. Could you elaborate?

[quote] Pat wrote:

[quote] Kingkai wrote:
If interpretation were as arbitrary as you seem to think (based on your comments above) the reality is that human communication would actually be impossible. Communication isn’t impossible because context plays a determinative role on interpretation. Context includes not only immediate literary context, but also cultural-social contexts. One cannot fully understand Dickens’ A Christmas Carol without knowing something about the plight of the poor or the widespread disdain for money lenders in early 19th century England. We have to do historical work to understand these time periods and, by extension, these works.
[/quote]
I am not saying interpretation is arbitrary, I am saying that various interpretations may not be perfect, but they all bring up points worth making. And that disregarding one’s life work because of perceived methodology is not really a fair thing to do because it doesn’t mean that the interpreter did not make good points that should be noted. This goes for new and old interpretations.
[/quote]

That’s debatable - there are some very well-crafted post-colonial interpretations of the conquest narratives in Joshua that completely miss the point of the text, and the same can be said of many feminist readings of Christ’s passion narratives. Sometimes the methodology doesn’t really fit or do justice to the material being interpreted, and since interpretations are made on the basis of particular methodologies (whether implicit or explicit), the interpretations and methods rise and fall with one another.

But you misunderstand - I’m not saying that we should dismiss whatever Augustine or Athanasius or Irenaeus said on every interpretive matter. However, if their methodology is perceptible through arguments for a particular interpretation, and if their methodology is flawed, I am not going to hold that particular interpretation in esteem simply because of who offered it. An interpretation derived on the basis of a flawed methodology does NOT stand simply because of the clout of the theologian who offers it.

People can only function ultimately on what they know. And for instance, literary interpretation does not negate nominological deductive methodology. If anything they could and likely should be complimentary.
We don’t have perfect interpretation but we have a lot of various interpretations. Looking at the consistencies of these overlaid on one another, we can find consistent threads that are likely the truth itself.

Do you think I am making such a dichotomy? I’m not dismissing the necessity of deductive reasoning; not sure where you are getting that. But as analytic philosophers continue to remind us, ordinary language is regularly ambiguous and requires constraint and precise definition. Consequently, literary interpretation enables us to understand what the original authors meant by their words and thus allows us to use those words properly in our deductions.

And as with any historical work, there is speculation, but it is informed speculation based on specific, consistent, and observable patterns of human behavior. We are working with probabilities. My point before was that I cannot observe God except through the very texts I am trying to understand in the first place; outside of those texts, I have no idea what God’s purposes or desires or goals might be. Consequently, if I am going to speculate about the divine intent, I have no paradigms to draw from, no claims that I can logically make about “the way Gods work” as I can with human beings. That means that, especially for Protestants, any speculation about divine intention apart from the discernible human intention (which is, once again, a simplistic way of referring to the implied author, a discernible construct of a text) based on historical, cultural, social, and linguistic data is uninformed speculation.

But we do have informed speculation. We have the word, and we have reams of thoughts on the words. We don’t have to draw conclusions based on things that are not there. We have enough information to draw good conclusions based on the information that is there.

This is circular reasoning, Pat. The issue between us is hermeneutical - what is the appropriate interpretive method to bring to the text? You cannot bypass this question of the appropriate interpretive schema by appealing to the very text we are trying to interpret! Once again, the historical evidence is on my side - inspiration for the earliest Christians did not a division between the human and the divine intention. Consequently, you aren’t getting this idea that “God meant more by the words than the humans did” from the text itself. So your claim that God means more by the written words than the human authors automatically entails speculation about the divine intent - you have no authority, yet you say GOD put the stuff you see in the text there for you to find. You need an outside source of authority to make that point legitimate.

And we do have evidence that divine and author’s intents not being exactly the same. These authors could not have speculated that they were writing for a world wide audience, but by a function of the will of God, these texts are open and available for a world wide audience.

The fact that the human author’s didn’t know others would read their works by God’s decree does not provide a basis for assuming that God means more by the same words than the human author’s did. That’s a gigantic leap. The fact that God intended more people to read the Scriptures does NOT mean that God included special meanings in the text perceptible only to those later readers. You’re missing a couple steps. We are talking about two different ideas of “intent” here.

And further that these texts have meaning to people beyond what the writer could have intended, without a good deal of divine revelation.

Not sure exactly what you are referring to here. Frankly, it sounds exactly like the point of contention - you want to believe that the additional meanings you and others have found in the text are legitimate, whereas I believe many of them derive from questionable interpretive habits and unfamiliarity with the contexts.

Was the Pentateuch to have meaning for those outside of Israel? Well certainly a good deal of it deals with them specifically, but contained with in are nuggets that have truth and meaning for all of us.

I have answered this already - the Pentateuch does NOT speak to humanity in general. It, as with the rest of the OT Scriptures, speaks to us in so far as we too have been grafted in and participate in ongoing story of God’s chosen people, Israel. Thus it remains relevant for us despite having been written in terms and cultural codes understandable to particular generations of the chosen people.

There are similarities (in translation) between the Koran and the OT, and the Koran’s been preserved for centuries. Should we believe that God inserted those similarities into the Koran too?

How but by the will of God could these ancient texts not only be available, but have meaning for people thousands of years after they were written? That’s a divine intent, not a writer’s intent.

Again, God’s preservation of the biblical texts does NOT imply that he included more or hidden meanings in those texts.

Well supposing that scholars of first/ second temple Judaism had to reconcile 3 different entities referred to as God it cannot be said that they would not have come to the same conclusion. The fact is that they didn’t have that, it was not reveal to them. If it were, it would have been a fact that they would have had to deal with, just like the Christians who came later had to deal with it. I don’t think they would have ignored the Deitific expression of Jesis and then the Holy Spirit as well as God the Father had it been revealed to them. They simply didn’t have the revelation to work with.
Had they had the revelation, it’s tough to say it would not have changed their interpretations. All they could do is deal with the information revealed to them at the time. Had they had to reconcile the three manifestations of God, then I am fairly confident they would have.

Ok, now I think I understand what you were getting at with this, but it seems like you are putting a lot of weight on a particular historical reconstruction of the revelatory process. What i mean is, the apostles WERE Second Temple Jews, and it is entirely debatable how the apostles came to the conclusion that Christ was also God. The evidence does not suggest that this revelation was simply dropped from above; rather, it seems to have developed over the course of their ministries. Now if they came to the conclusion that it was in some sense fitting to identify God (the Father), Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit as “God,” nonchalantly and without explanation, then the question is whether they had categories to explain it. I want to suggest that they did, and their categories were not the same as those later Christians used in an attempt to understand their language.

[quote] Pat wrote:

[quote] Kingkai wrote:

[quote] Pat wrote:
I sure as hell don’t buy the argument that early Christian theologians were functioning under false premises or paradigms and now we are not and now we got it write and it’s an interpretation without prejudice now, but it was heavily prejudiced then?
[/quote]

I never said it was an interpretation without “prejudice,” Pat, or that we are “unprejudiced” now. If you spent some time reading Gadamer, you would realize that “prejudice” (defined positively as revisable pre-judgments, structures or assumptions derived from our culture that enable to us make sense out of data) is what makes knowledge possible at all. My point is that scholarship no longer functions under the assumption of true objectivity’s possibility, whereas the ECFs essentially did. More importantly, we have become more aware of our own situatedness in particular contexts; a cursory reading of the ECFs reveals again and again that they did not recognize historical and cultural distance. In other words, they frequently interpreted the biblical texts without asking if their most basic, culturally-determined assumptions (their prejudices) were shared by those who wrote the biblical texts. So whereas we do our best (given our potential blindspots) to always ask, “does Paul mean the same thing by the word “honor” as I do,” the ECFs rarely asked such questions.
[/quote]

I don’t disagree that they probably didn’t ask these types of questions. But their analysis is no less valuable to understanding. They dealt with the texts and what they said and drew conclusions based on that. The fact that they used a more Aristotelian model for that, is not a bad thing either. It may be that they didn’t consider some contextual problems or linguisic twists, but they did reduce and deduce logically what certain things mean based on what is written in the text. Making sense out of data using a logic based model is not a bad thing. It’s not the only thing, but it’s not a bad thing. The logical models are able to tell us things and point out consistent threads and reduce the amount of noise that cloud various themes.
It’s not a bad method, it’s not the only method. Neither is linguistic and cultural analysis… It just tells me there is a lot more to learn and that the application of all the models will yield the best results, rather than one or to alone. Each tells us different things about the scriptures.
[/quote]

I really think I’ve either failed to adequately explain this point to you, or else you haven’t fully paid attention to what I’m saying. There is a fundamental and consistent problem running through patristic exegesis - a problem no Father escaped entirely - and that is their failure to recognize the influence of the dominant ideologies on their theologizing. They take for granted the congruence of their own culturally-determined frameworks with those of the biblical authors. And this often significantly affected their exegesis in negative ways.

More importantly, you seem to take “what is written in the text” as the given, which is a very naive view of “texts.” Language is a cultural phenomenon; you cannot avoid that. You HAVE to bring in cultural factors to understand the words being used in the text, and without being situated in a particular context, the text says NOTHING. The fact is that you are unaware of 95% of the actual difficulties in Scriptural interpretation because someone has already done the interpretation for you in order to make you a translation. Every translation IS an interpretation. This is the illusion propagated by “word-for-word” translations - they delude those with no knowledge of Greek into thinking that the text is essentially open to them. “Word-for-word” translations are really only valuable to people who have some familiarity with Greek and are able to recognize the underlying syntactical problems that the English tries to mirror while remaining intelligible.

I’m not saying that the ECF’s missed some “linguistic twists” or “contextual problems;” I’m saying that they started from the assumption, for example, that Love means X, a definition influenced tremendously by their culture, and then read definition X into the text. That’s a serious problem, as evidenced by Augustine’s ridiculous claims about the nature of love in “On Christian Teaching.”

[KingKai25]

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
I did say it was a monstrosity of a topic, did I not? I would personally credit the Greeks with quite a bit more than popular sophistry.
[/quote]

The question is what Paul is really referring to by the collocation sophia plus logos - is it Greek philosophy, or is it rather a reference to sophistry? Rhetors- trained public speakers - were the rockstars of the ancient world, gathering throngs of people, and I would argue (as do nearly all modern scholars AND even the Church Fathers) that it is against such figures specifically, NOT Greek philosophers more generally, that the Corinthians are wrongly evaluating Paul. The analysis of that collocation (sophia plus logos) in other Koine texts confirms this emphasis. See Duane Litfin’s Ph.D dissertation on this subject (it’s actually his second PhD), now considered seminal in the field; I remember reading a short essay (20-30 pages) summarizing the dissertation’s argument, but I can’t recall where i read it. Several others have been written now confirming his findings.

[quote] Tirib wrote:

JoabSonOfZeruiah wrote:[quote]dmaddox wrote:Seeing all those male on female kissing in Sodom was not Biblically accurate.[/quote]Haven’t seen it yet, just thought this was funny.[/quote]Well, with all due respect to D, I suspect there was a bit of heterosexual action goin on there as well or the population would have thinned out after a while unless they had immigration like ours. They actually did have one male male couple there. They were trying to give the impression the more that I think about it that general debauchery was God’s charge against Sodom and not homosexuality in particular which is a growing but disastrously erroneous view. Of course there WAS general debauchery in Sodom as well I’m sure.

LOL I made exactly this same comment and then thought better of it. It’s not like Sodom and Gomorrah were ENTIRELY populated by homosexuals; where would I do think that the issue is more complex than JUST homosexuality; homosexual practice was one more example of the perversity of those cities’ citizens. Other biblical texts note additional sins of Sodom (Ez. 16:49).

[Tiribulus]

I have removed this post for now.

[Karado]

Angels caused shenanigans down here, it sez so in JUDE…for what PURPOSE did they
leave their “first estate” for?
To play “Patty Cake, Patty Cake” down here?
No, for Hanky Panky.

Keep in mind, in Genesis The Angel/Human unions produced MEN of Renown, “Nephilim”…Hercules, Zeus…etc.
Notice in genesis 6 did not produce Women of renown, only Men…only Men…WHY is that??

(Rubbing Crystal Ball)…“Karado knock it off, why do you always ask the same TOUGH questions
we can’t answer, but just MAY be true?”

Well, no one like to tackle it, it’s embarrassing to even THINK this may be true…think
of the implications…now we have to explain to the world this EVER GROWING specific subject of Christianity
we have to give some answers for…And don’t forget we have to explain OTHER things as well, Like
that Supernatural FLOATING AXE in 2nd Kings, what’s THAT all about?
No one knows about the floating axe…Point is, the Bible is CHOCK FULL of supernatural stuff Man,
it’s what we BELIEVE, but it seems like we want to ‘pick and choose’ what to believe in there,
What about the Witch Of Endor?..etc. etc.

[KingKai25]

[quote]Karado wrote:
Angels caused shenanigans down here, it sez so in JUDE…for what PURPOSE did they
leave their “first estate” for?
To play “Patty Cake, Patty Cake” down here?
No, for Hanky Panky.

Keep in mind, in Genesis The Angel/Human unions produced MEN of Renown, “Nephilim”…Hercules, Zeus…etc.
Notice in genesis 6 did not produce Women of renown, only Men…only Men…WHY is that??

(Rubbing Crystal Ball)…“Karado knock it off, why do you always ask the same TOUGH questions
we can’t answer, but just MAY be true?”

Well, no one like to tackle it, it’s embarrassing to even THINK this may be true…think
of the implications…now we have to explain to the world this EVER GROWING specific subject of Christianity
we have to give some answers for…And don’t forget we have to explain OTHER things as well, Like
that Supernatural FLOATING AXE in 2nd Kings, what’s THAT all about?
No one knows about the floating axe…Point is, the Bible is CHOCK FULL of supernatural stuff Man,
it’s what we BELIEVE, but it seems like we want to ‘pick and choose’ what to believe in there,
What about the Witch Of Endor?..etc. etc.

[/quote]

I don’t have a problem believing in the actual occurrence of supernatural events reported in Scripture. I have no problem believing in the existence of angels and demons. The question, however, is to what extent the authoritative biblical text actually teaches a particular belief as true. If the text merely uses a story common at that time to illustrate a certain point (akin to the way pastors use the Chronicles of Narnia or the Lord of the Rings stories), that doesn’t mean they necessarily believed the story was true. People were freer with their quotations back in antiquity than we are today; plagiarism, while often condemned, wasn’t so strictly defined. Consequently, the fact that Jude and Peter allude to certain stories popular at the time in their messages doesn’t necessarily indicate that they believed those stories were true.

And I don’t think I or anyone else is trying to simply dismiss your questions because they make us uncomfortable. Frankly, they don’t, or at least, I am not discomfited by them. My only dilemma is that, judging from your posts, it seems like you think the mysteries of the universe might be hidden in these rather obscure passages. For the record, as I’ve said before, the interpretation of Genesis 6 as a reference to fallen angels is ONE late interpretation of that passage, and that interpretation is reflected in a number of texts, including Jude, 1-2 Peter, and 1 Enoch. But I use the word interpretation to distinguish it from “tradition,” which is an independent body of teaching growing up alongside of the biblical text. If Genesis 6, 1 Enoch, and Jude all were independent sources to this oral tradition passed down from the ancients of angelic beings copulating with humans, then you might have a case for the kinds of speculation you enjoy engaging in. But the fact is that 1 Enoch, Jude, and 1-2 Peter are NOT independent witnesses to an ancient oral tradition; rather, they are all witnesses to a single interpretation of Genesis 6, and there were other legitimate interpretations of Genesis 6 floating around at the same time. Consequently, there is no reason to believe that this interpretation is an accurate reading of Genesis 6.

And the point is, while you’re busy probing 1-2 Peter and Jude to see how well they match up with 1 Enoch, you’re actually MISSING the real points the authors were trying to make by including those stories in the first place. A pastor who refers to Aslan’s death to break the White Witch’s power as an allegory of Christ’s sacrifice isn’t trying to convince you that Aslan existed; he’s trying to illustrate the significance of Christ’s death. You’ve been a little too busy on here asking the text the wrong questions - instead of, “did angels sleep around,” you should be asking, “how do become more conformed to the image of Jesus?”

[Karado]

“But the fact is that 1 Enoch, Jude, and 1-2 Peter are NOT independent witnesses to an ancient oral tradition; rather, they are all witnesses to a single interpretation of Genesis 6, and there were other legitimate interpretations of Genesis 6 floating around at the same time”.

Very interesting and I thank you for responding, but what OTHER “legitimate interpretations of Genesis 6”
like specifically who the “sons of god” were? I know of ONE other interpretation, what do you know that
that we don’t here?
Because the only other option which actually came much later was that the “sons of god” were from the
supposed ungodly line of cain.

I feel I WAS taught WRONGLY that this passage in Genesis 6 actually refered to a failure to keep the “faithful” lines of Seth separate from the “worldly” line of Cain. The idea I was taught that after Cain killed Abel, the line of Seth remained separate and faithful, but the line of Cain turned ungodly and rebellious. The “Sons of God” are deemed to refer to leadership in the line of Seth, the daughters of men is deemed restricted to the line of Cain. The resulting marriages blurred some kind of inferred separation between them.

Keep in mind Celsus and Julian the Apostate used that traditional ANGEL view to attack Christianity, and Julius Africanus resorted to that Sethite interpretation as more ‘comfortable’, or acceptable if you will. Cyril of Alexandria also rejected the orthodox ANGEL position with the line of Seth interpretation as well. Augustine also embraced the Sethite theory and thus that was the belief into the Middle Ages, and it’s STILL widely taught today among ALOT of churches who find the literal Angel view a bit disturbing.

King Kai, I smell a ‘cover up’…IDK, and as far as the supposed late non-witness testimony in scripture,
is not The Bible INSPIRED whether or not the writers alluding to the Angel’s sexual sins were ACTUAL witnesses
to those actual events or not?
I like your last sentence regardless, and I will see if I can find some kind of legit connection to YESHUA
in all this because that’s what matters most, I don’t quite “catch” that yet maybe, If give me enough info to ee this with new ‘eyes’, then if you really think Angels supposed coitus with earth women is bullshit, you MIGHT…MIGHT be able to give me enough “ammo” to go the other way around on this…lets see how good you are…lol jk…kinda.
thx again.

[treco]

Whew - after several hours of reading some posts and skimming/ignoring the rest that are 2000 words longs -

Thank you Lord for giving me simple faith rather than a desire to analyze every jot and tittle.

[KingKai25]

[quote]Karado wrote:
“But the fact is that 1 Enoch, Jude, and 1-2 Peter are NOT independent witnesses to an ancient oral tradition; rather, they are all witnesses to a single interpretation of Genesis 6, and there were other legitimate interpretations of Genesis 6 floating around at the same time”.

Very interesting and I thank you for responding, but what OTHER “legitimate interpretations of Genesis 6”
like specifically who the “sons of god” were? I know of ONE other interpretation, what do you know that
that we don’t here?
Because the only other option which actually came much later was that the “sons of god” were from the
supposed ungodly line of cain.

I feel I WAS taught WRONGLY that this passage in Genesis 6 actually refered to a failure to keep the “faithful” lines of Seth separate from the “worldly” line of Cain. The idea I was taught that after Cain killed Abel, the line of Seth remained separate and faithful, but the line of Cain turned ungodly and rebellious. The “Sons of God” are deemed to refer to leadership in the line of Seth, the daughters of men is deemed restricted to the line of Cain. The resulting marriages blurred some kind of inferred separation between them.
[/quote]

There is a third possibility - the human rulers interpretation. I am almost positive I went over this before with you, but I might be wrong. In the ancient Near Eastern context in which Genesis was composed, kings were also referred to as “Sons of God;” in fact, the author of Psalm 82 is likely playing on the dual identification of angels and kings as “Sons of God.” Further supporting this interpretation is the fact that Nimrod (a clearly human figure) in Genesis 10:8 is described with the same designation as the Nephilim in 6:4 (“a mighty one”), suggesting that the Nephilim are simply human figures as well. This understanding of Genesis 6 was favored by the rabbis (mid-first century-early second century A.D.). The faithful lines of Seth thing has no real contextual support; you are correct to dismiss it. But it is not the only alternative.

King Kai, I smell a ‘cover up’…IDK, and as far as the supposed late non-witness testimony in scripture,
is not The Bible INSPIRED whether or not the writers alluding to the Angel’s sexual sins were ACTUAL witnesses
to those actual events or not?

Inspiration isn’t the issue; inspiration doesn’t dictate the generic conventions of a text. In other words, while inspiration guarantees the truth of the message conveyed, it does not turn hyperbolic or parabolic statements into historical or scientific accounts of reality. When Jesus says in Mark 4:31, that the kingdom of God, “is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth,” his purpose wasn’t to make an accurate scientific statement (there are smaller seeds), but rather to illustrate the point that the kingdom of God starts out small and becomes something much larger than anyone could have predicted. To read Jesus’ hyperbolic statement about the mustard seed as a scientific assertion is to place an unjustified demand on his claims, and to thereby MISS Jesus’ actual point.

The same point applies to the references to the angels’ sins - the fact that these stories are being used in an illustrative manner does not itself indicate that the authors thought these stories were true. And if those human authors did not intend those stories to be taken literally, then inspiration doesn’t suddenly change those stories’ genres from parable to historical account. Inspiration does not shift a text’s genre; it merely guarantees that the message meant to be conveyed through that particular generic form is true.

[pat]

[quote]KingKai25 wrote:
pat wrote:
The disconnect seems to be that it seems you are answering questions I am not asking. That’s what I have been finding frustrating. It’s not that I don’t understand what you are saying, it’s that what you are saying isn’t necessarily related to what I am saying.

So for instance, the whole thing about divine inspiration. I am really not concerned with how it occurred. My point was simply that the divine intent isn’t necessarily the same as the human intent. That what God had in mind, was more (or perhaps) even less than what the writer had in mind.
It doesn’t matter if the writer took dictation, fell in a trance, God came down and guided his had, or if the human and divine thoughts were commingled in the authors head as a single cohesive thought. God using man as his instrument doesn’t portend that this divine inspiration took place a certain way.

I disagree about the relevance of my points. The mode of inspiration has direct bearing on the appropriate hermeneutic to apply to the text. If the early church used the term “inspiration” to describe some sort of process in which the divine intent is identical the human intent, i.e., these texts communicate through the same linguistic and cultural conventions humans use to communicate with each other at a particular time and place , then my source of authority (the belief of the early church) only CLEARLY supports a reading strategy wherein the divine intent is accessed THROUGH the human. Since the early church did not believe in multiple meanings beyond those intended by the human authors, any positing of additional divine meanings unknown to the biblical authors is mere speculation.
[/quote]
I am not talking about the relevance of your points. I am saying you are answering questions I did not ask, or or positions I did not take. Perhaps, you are over answering.

In short, I can argue for the reading strategy I’ve adopted based on (1) the nature of language and (2) the authoritative beliefs of the earliest Christians. If you want to take their term, “inspiration,” and expand its sense to include God’s additional communication to “those in the know” by the very same words that already make sense in their original literary, cultural, and historical contexts, then the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate the legitimacy of this proposal, because there is nothing in the doctrine as they understand it that supports your expansion. It is arbitrary and speculative, no matter how many figures in the RCC or Protestantism you can recall who make the same move.

As you stated earlier, you have to take both the OT and the NT together, one does not negate the other. Problem is that the NT enlivens the OT in ways that scholars of old, those prior to the NT could not have envisioned. Going back the Gen 1 and then reconciling it with John 1, what then makes more sense? A heavenly counsel that is not mentioned, or a manifestation of God through whom all that exists was made and that without him, could not be made?

I really don’t think it much matter who thought what along time ago prior to the revelation of John 1. John 1 tells us something about creation which Genesis did not. The plural self reference in Gen 1 becomes much easier to reconcile with the revelation of John 1.

Certainly in my life, God has taken me down paths were I thought I was in control and making the decisions, but really I was just an instrument of his will. He didn’t appear to me, he didn’t dictate to me, he just took me where I needed to be by his will.
I would argue the same for divine scripture. The author had his own thoughts and purposes and was in complete control over what he was writing, but the divine will in the end made it so much more than the author could have ever imagined.
And that’s really it.

This is a much better and clearer analogy, but once again, I have to ask if this analogy fits with the way the earliest Christians understood “inspiration,” and once again, I’d have to say no. Is it possible? Sure, hypothetically. But I have too much respect for God to presume to know things about him or his operations in this world that have not been clearly revealed to us, which includes claiming that he meant something by a text other than what can be discerned through standard modes of human interpretation.

I am not pushing for anything. I am not saying the word says something the author didn’t intend. The word actually says exactly what the author intended it to say. Now that doesn’t mean that the intent of God through these writings had more in mind. Certainly, the writer of Genesis, was not aware of John Chapter 1. But John felt very compelled that before all of creation was, Jesus was. That all things were created through him.
Now the author of Genesis did not know that, unless it was revealed to him. But that doesn’t mean that the intent of God was that John 1 has something to reveal about Genesis 1, that was not previously known.
I don’t buy that subsequent scriptures do not open up more about the prior simply because the author did not have that in mind.
It may be a writer’s hand, but it’s still God’s book and he had something to say to us. The author’s may or may not have been aware of God’s full intent.

I’m sorry, Pat, but I’m not following the beginning of your argument here. It seems like your missing some particles in the above statements. Regarding the Genesis example, I can say once again that, given the nature of the composition of literary texts in the ancient world, there are two really compelling possibilities. On the one hand, Genesis 1-2 could be a hodgepodge of hastily sewn together material reflecting widely diverse perspectives on the nature of the gods, and both the use of elohim (a plural noun) and the “us” language reflects the original polytheistic contexts of these passages. This is the dominant position among secular scholars, and the fact is that, for anyone who knows Hebrew, it is highly convincing. Why would I NOT choose that position over the view that God left a completely enigmatic statement in Genesis, a statement whose meaning and purpose within the narrative was unknown to the human author and only revealed centuries later to Christians who had a copy of John’s gospel and could read it in tandem with Genesis?

I really don’t see why not. There is much that God has revealed over time. Why wouldn’t God do just that. Reveal later what he meant by something earlier. Seems to me that God does this often especially with regards to prophecy. The prophets or the scholars don’t know what the prophecy is or means at the time of composition, but is revealed later when it has been fulfilled.
Certainly Jesus would not have been chucked from the Temple when he said “This prophecy has been fulfilled in your hearing” if they knew what it meant.

But there is another possibility, and that is that the human author was following common conventions of the ancient Near Eastern “origin account” genre by supplying a subtle allusion to the heavenly council, an idea (contrary to Push’s erroneous claims) found several times throughout the Old Testament.

Perhaps, but that seems like the least likely possibility. It forces us to make many more assumptions than a Trinitarian interpretation. We have to assume that this counsel existed in the creation process, was with God at the moment of his doing, and that they are all made in his image. Now it’s possible they were made in his image, it’s possible they were there, but the problem is there is no allusion to it at all. If the counsel were present, why not state it? Just like if it was the Trinity he was referring to, why not state that? It’s states neither. All we have is a plural self reference and result where it states explicitly man was made in God’s image. It did not leave the possibility that man was made in God’s and a counsel’s image.

I can see this being an issue to reconcile between 1st and 2nd temple Jews, but with the revelation of the Christian scripture, it seems now you don’t have to make those assumptions. There is nothing there that implies a heavenly counsel presence save for a Christian interpretation. I don’t think you can deny the revelations of the NT scriptures, shedding a great deal more light on the meanings of the OT scriptures.

Perhaps our theological backgrounds are in play, but I have read many protestant analysis that also agree with what I have expressed. But in Catholic Bibles, for instance, the references to Jesus and ‘I AM’ in the Gospels are always capitalized. The point was for the reader to make, that link. Now of course I don’t know if that was expressed that way in the original texts. But that also doesn’t mean the link isn’t there.

I recognize that many Protestants would agree with your claims, but that doesn’t nullify my point - such Protestants are, in my opinion, insufficiently self-critical. They don’t see the inherent theological problem in attempting to use the canon as the standard of orthodoxy while also affirming particular Roman Catholic formulations of received doctrines as binding without explicit biblical warrant (no Tirib, this is not a jab).

And I’m not getting the relevance of Jesus’ “I Am” statements for this discussion. Could you elaborate?

Certainly, in statements like"
Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” The ‘I AM’ is capitalized, to make reference to ‘I AM that AM’

Pat wrote:
Kingkai wrote:
If interpretation were as arbitrary as you seem to think (based on your comments above) the reality is that human communication would actually be impossible. Communication isn’t impossible because context plays a determinative role on interpretation. Context includes not only immediate literary context, but also cultural-social contexts. One cannot fully understand Dickens’ A Christmas Carol without knowing something about the plight of the poor or the widespread disdain for money lenders in early 19th century England. We have to do historical work to understand these time periods and, by extension, these works.

I am not saying interpretation is arbitrary, I am saying that various interpretations may not be perfect, but they all bring up points worth making. And that disregarding one’s life work because of perceived methodology is not really a fair thing to do because it doesn’t mean that the interpreter did not make good points that should be noted. This goes for new and old interpretations.

That’s debatable - there are some very well-crafted post-colonial interpretations of the conquest narratives in Joshua that completely miss the point of the text, and the same can be said of many feminist readings of Christ’s passion narratives. Sometimes the methodology doesn’t really fit or do justice to the material being interpreted, and since interpretations are made on the basis of particular methodologies (whether implicit or explicit), the interpretations and methods rise and fall with one another.

But you misunderstand - I’m not saying that we should dismiss whatever Augustine or Athanasius or Irenaeus said on every interpretive matter. However, if their methodology is perceptible through arguments for a particular interpretation, and if their methodology is flawed, I am not going to hold that particular interpretation in esteem simply because of who offered it. An interpretation derived on the basis of a flawed methodology does NOT stand simply because of the clout of the theologian who offers it.

I think it’s more important that what they said be the truth rather than to get caught up in methodology you disagree with it now. No methodology is without bias. A method it merely a means to an end. What ultimately matters is the end and if the end is correct, what does it matter the methodology?

People can only function ultimately on what they know. And for instance, literary interpretation does not negate nominological deductive methodology. If anything they could and likely should be complimentary.
We don’t have perfect interpretation but we have a lot of various interpretations. Looking at the consistencies of these overlaid on one another, we can find consistent threads that are likely the truth itself.

Do you think I am making such a dichotomy? I’m not dismissing the necessity of deductive reasoning; not sure where you are getting that. But as analytic philosophers continue to remind us, ordinary language is regularly ambiguous and requires constraint and precise definition. Consequently, literary interpretation enables us to understand what the original authors meant by their words and thus allows us to use those words properly in our deductions.

It enables us to discern what we think they meant. There is no guarantee that intense literary scrutiny will reveal a persons true meaning and true intent.
But then it brings me back to the Gen 1 problem. If we are scrutinizing every nuance of language and phrasing, how then are we to insert things that are not there?

And as with any historical work, there is speculation, but it is informed speculation based on specific, consistent, and observable patterns of human behavior. We are working with probabilities. My point before was that I cannot observe God except through the very texts I am trying to understand in the first place; outside of those texts, I have no idea what God’s purposes or desires or goals might be. Consequently, if I am going to speculate about the divine intent, I have no paradigms to draw from, no claims that I can logically make about “the way Gods work” as I can with human beings. That means that, especially for Protestants, any speculation about divine intention apart from the discernible human intention (which is, once again, a simplistic way of referring to the implied author, a discernible construct of a text) based on historical, cultural, social, and linguistic data is uninformed speculation.

But we do have informed speculation. We have the word, and we have reams of thoughts on the words. We don’t have to draw conclusions based on things that are not there. We have enough information to draw good conclusions based on the information that is there.

This is circular reasoning, Pat. The issue between us is hermeneutical - what is the appropriate interpretive method to bring to the text? You cannot bypass this question of the appropriate interpretive schema by appealing to the very text we are trying to interpret! Once again, the historical evidence is on my side - inspiration for the earliest Christians did not a division between the human and the divine intention. Consequently, you aren’t getting this idea that “God meant more by the words than the humans did” from the text itself. So your claim that God means more by the written words than the human authors automatically entails speculation about the divine intent - you have no authority, yet you say GOD put the stuff you see in the text there for you to find. You need an outside source of authority to make that point legitimate.

And we do have evidence that divine and author’s intents not being exactly the same. These authors could not have speculated that they were writing for a world wide audience, but by a function of the will of God, these texts are open and available for a world wide audience.

The fact that the human author’s didn’t know others would read their works by God’s decree does not provide a basis for assuming that God means more by the same words than the human author’s did. That’s a gigantic leap. The fact that God intended more people to read the Scriptures does NOT mean that God included special meanings in the text perceptible only to those later readers. You’re missing a couple steps. We are talking about two different ideas of “intent” here.

And further that these texts have meaning to people beyond what the writer could have intended, without a good deal of divine revelation.

Not sure exactly what you are referring to here. Frankly, it sounds exactly like the point of contention - you want to believe that the additional meanings you and others have found in the text are legitimate, whereas I believe many of them derive from questionable interpretive habits and unfamiliarity with the contexts.

I simply say that there are problems, scenarios, conflicts within the texts that demand a resolution for their meanings. I do not believe simple context resolves them, they may help, but does not resolve the issue.
I do not consider biblical interpretation to be ‘case closed’ by any stretch of the imagination, especially by simply adding context or literary analysis. Having those tools mey resolve some pressure, but it also may create additional questions.

Was the Pentateuch to have meaning for those outside of Israel? Well certainly a good deal of it deals with them specifically, but contained with in are nuggets that have truth and meaning for all of us.

I have answered this already - the Pentateuch does NOT speak to humanity in general. It, as with the rest of the OT Scriptures, speaks to us in so far as we too have been grafted in and participate in ongoing story of God’s chosen people, Israel. Thus it remains relevant for us despite having been written in terms and cultural codes understandable to particular generations of the chosen people.

There are similarities (in translation) between the Koran and the OT, and the Koran’s been preserved for centuries. Should we believe that God inserted those similarities into the Koran too?

I don’t know enough about the Koran to draw any conclusions about it.

How but by the will of God could these ancient texts not only be available, but have meaning for people thousands of years after they were written? That’s a divine intent, not a writer’s intent.

Again, God’s preservation of the biblical texts does NOT imply that he included more or hidden meanings in those texts.

I don’t know what you mean by ‘hidden meanings’. I am not asserting there are hidden meanings or codes in the texts. I am simply saying that as time goes on and as more tools become available to us, we are able to grasp a fuller meaning of what was written. Not ‘hidden meanings’.
I am not asserting hidden meanings, I am asserting a more complete understanding. The way you state that makes it sound like I am asserting a type of divination to the scripture. I am not playing the record backwards to find hidden meanings. That’s the disconnect I think.

Well supposing that scholars of first/ second temple Judaism had to reconcile 3 different entities referred to as God it cannot be said that they would not have come to the same conclusion. The fact is that they didn’t have that, it was not reveal to them. If it were, it would have been a fact that they would have had to deal with, just like the Christians who came later had to deal with it. I don’t think they would have ignored the Deitific expression of Jesus and then the Holy Spirit as well as God the Father had it been revealed to them. They simply didn’t have the revelation to work with.
Had they had the revelation, it’s tough to say it would not have changed their interpretations. All they could do is deal with the information revealed to them at the time. Had they had to reconcile the three manifestations of God, then I am fairly confident they would have.

Ok, now I think I understand what you were getting at with this, but it seems like you are putting a lot of weight on a particular historical reconstruction of the revelatory process. What i mean is, the apostles WERE Second Temple Jews, and it is entirely debatable how the apostles came to the conclusion that Christ was also God. The evidence does not suggest that this revelation was simply dropped from above; rather, it seems to have developed over the course of their ministries. Now if they came to the conclusion that it was in some sense fitting to identify God (the Father), Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit as “God,” nonchalantly and without explanation, then the question is whether they had categories to explain it. I want to suggest that they did, and their categories were not the same as those later Christians used in an attempt to understand their language.

I am figuring more that what they understood as God’s nature was a given and didn’t require a full explanation where that understanding got lost in later generations as the word was spread and understood through cultural paradigms. So as to why didn’t NT writers just state it that way? Well, perhaps they couldn’t imagine we’d be so dense as to need it broken down like that. They also didn’t seem to write in a way that would suggest that the world would last much longer.

Pat wrote:
Kingkai wrote:
Pat wrote:
I sure as hell don’t buy the argument that early Christian theologians were functioning under false premises or paradigms and now we are not and now we got it write and it’s an interpretation without prejudice now, but it was heavily prejudiced then?

I never said it was an interpretation without “prejudice,” Pat, or that we are “unprejudiced” now. If you spent some time reading Gadamer, you would realize that “prejudice” (defined positively as revisable pre-judgments, structures or assumptions derived from our culture that enable to us make sense out of data) is what makes knowledge possible at all. My point is that scholarship no longer functions under the assumption of true objectivity’s possibility, whereas the ECFs essentially did. More importantly, we have become more aware of our own situatedness in particular contexts; a cursory reading of the ECFs reveals again and again that they did not recognize historical and cultural distance. In other words, they frequently interpreted the biblical texts without asking if their most basic, culturally-determined assumptions (their prejudices) were shared by those who wrote the biblical texts. So whereas we do our best (given our potential blindspots) to always ask, “does Paul mean the same thing by the word “honor” as I do,” the ECFs rarely asked such questions.

I don’t disagree that they probably didn’t ask these types of questions. But their analysis is no less valuable to understanding. They dealt with the texts and what they said and drew conclusions based on that. The fact that they used a more Aristotelian model for that, is not a bad thing either. It may be that they didn’t consider some contextual problems or linguisic twists, but they did reduce and deduce logically what certain things mean based on what is written in the text. Making sense out of data using a logic based model is not a bad thing. It’s not the only thing, but it’s not a bad thing. The logical models are able to tell us things and point out consistent threads and reduce the amount of noise that cloud various themes.
It’s not a bad method, it’s not the only method. Neither is linguistic and cultural analysis… It just tells me there is a lot more to learn and that the application of all the models will yield the best results, rather than one or to alone. Each tells us different things about the scriptures.

I agree, every mode of analysis that is not inherently flawed and is available should be taken. One should not be disregarded for the other either, rather the results should be compared.

[quote]

I really think I’ve either failed to adequately explain this point to you, or else you haven’t fully paid attention to what I’m saying. There is a fundamental and consistent problem running through patristic exegesis - a problem no Father escaped entirely - and that is their failure to recognize the influence of the dominant ideologies on their theologizing. They take for granted the congruence of their own culturally-determined frameworks with those of the biblical authors. And this often significantly affected their exegesis in negative ways.

More importantly, you seem to take “what is written in the text” as the given, which is a very naive view of “texts.” Language is a cultural phenomenon; you cannot avoid that. You HAVE to bring in cultural factors to understand the words being used in the text, and without being situated in a particular context, the text says NOTHING. The fact is that you are unaware of 95% of the actual difficulties in Scriptural interpretation because someone has already done the interpretation for you in order to make you a translation. Every translation IS an interpretation. This is the illusion propagated by “word-for-word” translations - they delude those with no knowledge of Greek into thinking that the text is essentially open to them. “Word-for-word” translations are really only valuable to people who have some familiarity with Greek and are able to recognize the underlying syntactical problems that the English tries to mirror while remaining intelligible.

I’m not saying that the ECF’s missed some “linguistic twists” or “contextual problems;” I’m saying that they started from the assumption, for example, that Love means X, a definition influenced tremendously by their culture, and then read definition X into the text. That’s a serious problem, as evidenced by Augustine’s ridiculous claims about the nature of love in “On Christian Teaching.”[/quote]

I don’t think that’s the case. Maybe for some, but for others, they did consider their influences. The Aristotelian methodology is actually a good tool to use for eliminating that weakness. What they did not have was perfect linguistic analysis. It just wasn’t there en masse. I don’t think you do away with one in favor of the other.

[Tiribulus]

OK Pat, you win. I do believe that’s the longest post I have seen here yet. =D

[pat]

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
OK Pat, you win. I do believe that’s the longest post I have seen here yet. =D[/quote]

LOL… Yeah, I should have cut it down.

[pat]

[quote]dmaddox wrote:

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
Well I watched the 1st episode of that bible program on the History channel. Let’s just say it was a hundred times better and 50 times worse than it could have been. Some of the stuff they changed was totally inexplicable after all the supernatural, generally accurate stuff they DID do fairly well. Of course Sodom was rewritten to be politically correct. Overall better than I would have predicted.[/quote]

Agree 100% with your assessment. They used some creative freedom to make some changes, either to fit time, or just be politically correct. Seeing all those male on female kissing in Sodom was not Biblically accurate.[/quote]

Well, yeah, they sanitized it a bit. Yeah, they took some liberties with the series. Yeah, some of the retelling I would deem inaccurate. I think the portrayal of David was the most inaccurate thus far. However, I understand the issue. You have 10 hours with which to work with to tell the story of the whole Bible. I think maybe they could have done a little better, but here’s where I think the whole thing is very good… The viewership has thus far been 10 -13 million people on average. More so if you include reruns and ‘tivo’. Now it stands to reason many of the people already read the Bible and/ or already know it to a degree. But there is going to be a good bit of people with exposure to the Bible.

Now of those people, at least some of them will buy or borrow a Bible. And of those some, a few will take to it. And of those, a few will convert and give their hearts to God.
So if it is able to bring a few people to the foot of the Cross, I consider it a resounding success. Much like ‘The Passion of the Christ’, though this lacks the potency of that film.

[dmaddox]

[quote]pat wrote:

[quote]dmaddox wrote:

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
Well I watched the 1st episode of that bible program on the History channel. Let’s just say it was a hundred times better and 50 times worse than it could have been. Some of the stuff they changed was totally inexplicable after all the supernatural, generally accurate stuff they DID do fairly well. Of course Sodom was rewritten to be politically correct. Overall better than I would have predicted.[/quote]

Agree 100% with your assessment. They used some creative freedom to make some changes, either to fit time, or just be politically correct. Seeing all those male on female kissing in Sodom was not Biblically accurate.[/quote]

Well, yeah, they sanitized it a bit. Yeah, they took some liberties with the series. Yeah, some of the retelling I would deem inaccurate. I think the portrayal of David was the most inaccurate thus far. However, I understand the issue. You have 10 hours with which to work with to tell the story of the whole Bible. I think maybe they could have done a little better, but here’s where I think the whole thing is very good… The viewership has thus far been 10 -13 million people on average. More so if you include reruns and ‘tivo’. Now it stands to reason many of the people already read the Bible and/ or already know it to a degree. But there is going to be a good bit of people with exposure to the Bible.

Now of those people, at least some of them will buy or borrow a Bible. And of those some, a few will take to it. And of those, a few will convert and give their hearts to God.
So if it is able to bring a few people to the foot of the Cross, I consider it a resounding success. Much like ‘The Passion of the Christ’, though this lacks the potency of that film.
[/quote]

I agree. I will say that if this stays up in viewership some sort of more indepth portrayal or series could come from it. We will see. I have enjoyed it thus far.

Satan being played by Obama is nice. That is a joke.

[KingKai25]

All this stuff is connected, Pat. If the points I’ve been making about the meaning and mode of inspiration are true, then that has significant ramifications for your points. When it comes to the study of ancient texts especially, your conclusions do not stand regardless of the method you employ and the presuppositions you build upon to arrive at them.

[quote] Pat wrote:
As you stated earlier, you have to take both the OT and the NT together, one does not negate the other. Problem is that the NT enlivens the OT in ways that scholars of old, those prior to the NT could not have envisioned.
[/quote]

There is something I think you are missing here - there are two different groups of readers we are talking about, and neither of those groups are “scholars of old, those prior to the NT.”

The first group is the scholars of the NT - I.e., the apostles who wrote the NT books and did exegesis of the OT. These WERE scholars prior to the NT. They were Second Temple Jews using many of the same hermeneutical methods as other Second Temple Jews! So you cannot simply dismiss arguments based on how Second Temple Jews would have read the text.

More importantly, the second group is the original audience Genesis 1 was intended for. I’ll try this in steps.

1. Once again, the doctrine of inspiration as understood by the earliest church precludes your argument that the human author of Genesis 1 did not know EXACTLY why and what he meant by including the plural in his portrayal of God’s speech in 1:26.

2. Consequently, he had an audience in mind for whom that revelation was originally intended, and given the language he used, his style, and his use of the tropes and genres only available to those of his own time period, the most likely audience is the one contemporaneous with himself.

3. Therefore, we have to ask how that audience would have read the text, because it was specifically written to be understood by them.

4. Since we have no evidence that those living before the last half of the first century A.D. thought of God as a trinity (and arguably, even those who did think of God as such - Christians - didn’t even have it fully worked out yet), it is probable that the Trinity was NOT part of the religious framework of the original audience of Genesis 1:26. In other words, they would not have filled in the gaps in the text (i.e., to whom else God refers in 1:26) with the Trinity; it would have required explanation in the text itself.

5. If that’s the case, then there HAS to have been a way of making sense out of Genesis 1:26 that employs ONLY the categories available to the original readers, those to whom the text was initially addressed.

6. And finally, if such an interpretation must therefore exist, there is no need at all for the Trinitarian interpretation of Genesis 1:26.

Going back the Gen 1 and then reconciling it with John 1, what then makes more sense? A heavenly counsel that is not mentioned, or a manifestation of God through whom all that exists was made and that without him, could not be made? John 1 tells us something about creation which Genesis did not. The plural self reference in Gen 1 becomes much easier to reconcile with the revelation of John 1.

First of all, I can turn this question right back at you. What makes more sense - that in a text written by a man before even the existence of God’s own SON Jesus was known, the author assumed his audience would recognize the divine council motif, a standard feature of the genre in which he was writing, as soon as he mentioned “us,” OR that he possessed a revelation of God’s plurality unknown to any Jews before OR after him and simply FORGOT to clarify both that the “us” God was referring to was Godself AND what God’s plurality entailed?

Secondly, Genesis 1:26 doesn’t NEED reconciled with John 1! It doesn’t need reconciliation because NO New Testament author EVER claims that Genesis 1:26 is a reference to the Trinity. ONLY if that were to occur (since the NT is an authoritative source) would I necessarily HAVE to read Genesis 1:26 as a reference to the Trinity. Once again, given the concept of representation which was part of the cultural context, John may have assumed that it was actually Jesus who did the creating in Genesis 1 (i.e., that the references to God as creator are references to the pre-incarnate Christ), or possibly that Jesus was indeed the “logos” through which God created the world, i.e., his actual spoken word.

Based on the above, the concept of the Trinity is NOT necessary to understand Genesis 1:26; the burden of proof is actually on you to show that the Trinitarian interpretation is even a legitimate reading of Genesis 1:26 at all.

[quote]Pat wrote:

[quote]Kingkai wrote:
Regarding the Genesis example, I can say once again that, given the nature of the composition of literary texts in the ancient world, there are two really compelling possibilities. On the one hand, Genesis 1-2 could be a hodgepodge of hastily sewn together material reflecting widely diverse perspectives on the nature of the gods, and both the use of elohim (a plural noun) and the “us” language reflects the original polytheistic contexts of these passages. This is the dominant position among secular scholars, and the fact is that, for anyone who knows Hebrew, it is highly convincing. Why would I NOT choose that position over the view that God left a completely enigmatic statement in Genesis, a statement whose meaning and purpose within the narrative was unknown to the human author and only revealed centuries later to Christians who had a copy of John’s gospel and could read it in tandem with Genesis?
[/quote]

I really don’t see why not. There is much that God has revealed over time. Why wouldn’t God do just that. Reveal later what he meant by something earlier. Seems to me that God does this often especially with regards to prophecy. The prophets or the scholars don’t know what the prophecy is or means at the time of composition, but is revealed later when it has been fulfilled.
Certainly Jesus would not have been chucked from the Temple when he said “This prophecy has been fulfilled in your hearing” if they knew what it meant.
[/quote]

Your prophets analogy doesn’t work at all. First, prophecy is a completely different genre then narrative; you cannot compare an ostensibly directly spoken promise of God about a future act with a discussion of events that have already happened. Secondly, and more importantly, God didn’t write Genesis 1:26; a human being did under inspiration, a doctrinal term assumed by those who coined it to entail that the human being knew what he meant by what he wrote. Finally, according to 1 Peter 1:10-12, the prophets DID know that their prophecies were about Christ; they simply did not know the precise time or exact circumstances surrounding the fulfillment.

And why wouldn’t God do that, you ask? Perhaps because it places us automatically above those who existed before Christ in spiritual stature. In other words, your question implies that God didn’t care if his chosen people Israel understood the Scriptures; he only cared if the people who lived after Christ understood the Scriptures. Genesis then wouldn’t really be revelation for the Jews; it would only be revelation for us. But even if that explanation fails to convince you, the fact remains that we have no evidence that God did leave gaps in the OT only to fill them in later, and in the absence of such evidence, we should be very wary of making claims about what GOD does or doesn’t do.

And Jesus wasn’t chucked out of the TEMPLE for saying that; he was chucked out of a synagogue. And he wasn’t chucked out because he claimed to be the fulfillment of the prophecy - the people actually seem to respond quite favorably to that (Luke 4:21-22) - but rather because he THEN chastises them and implies that they are akin to the wicked Israelites in the time of Elijah whom God passed over in favor of helping Gentiles! In fact, there is AMPLE evidence that the later Isaiah passages were already read messianically, which is why those in the synagogue initially had no problem with his interpretation.

Perhaps, but that seems like the least likely possibility. It forces us to make many more assumptions than a Trinitarian interpretation. We have to assume that this counsel existed in the creation process, was with God at the moment of his doing, and that they are all made in his image. Now it’s possible they were made in his image, it’s possible they were there, but the problem is there is no allusion to it at all. If the counsel were present, why not state it? Just like if it was the Trinity he was referring to, why not state that? It’s states neither. All we have is a plural self reference and result where it states explicitly man was made in God’s image. It did not leave the possibility that man was made in God’s and a counsel’s image. I can see this being an issue to reconcile between 1st and 2nd temple Jews, but with the revelation of the Christian scripture, it seems now you don’t have to make those assumptions. There is nothing there that implies a heavenly counsel presence save for a Christian interpretation. I don’t think you can deny the revelations of the NT scriptures, shedding a great deal more light on the meanings of the OT scriptures.

I basically answered this above. Your argument is that, given that the text does not explicitly state that either a council or the Trinity is the referent, and we have references to Jesus’ agency in creation, the Trinitarian reading makes more sense. My point is that, since Genesis is a high context document written as revelation to a specific group of people long predating the first century Jews and Christians, I have to come up with a reason why the explanation is left out. Since the heavenly council is a stock feature of origin accounts, it wouldn’t NEED to be explicitly laid out for them; the allusion to “us” could be sufficient code to make the message clear to the original audience. The Trinitarian reading, on the other hand, WOULD require explanation at ANY TIME before the late first century A.D. And once again, the NT Scriptures at no point prescribe how Genesis 1:26 is supposed to be read; John’s claim that Jesus was involved in creation does not constitute an implicit claim about the meaning of Genesis 1:26.

And I’m not getting the relevance of Jesus’ “I Am” statements for this discussion. Could you elaborate?

Certainly, in statements like"
Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” The ‘I AM’ is capitalized, to make reference to ‘I AM that AM’

I didn’t mean I don’t know what references you had in mind; I simply meant I don’t know how they contribute to your argument. There’s really only one clear “I am” statement, and it’s the one you quoted. And even it is subject to varying interpretations, meaning it’s not so clearly an allusion to God’s self reference in Exodus as we would like to think. More importantly, Jesus’ self-identification as Yahweh here doesn’t mean that Jesus is necessarily reinterpreting the Exodus passage; it doesn’t necessarily imply that HE’s the one speaking in the burning bush. In fact, according to Acts 7, that was an angel functioning as God representative to Moses. Jesus’ is simply identifying himself with Yahweh, not prescribing a new interpretation of Moses’ call in Exodus.

[quote]Pat wrote:

[quote] Kingkai wrote:
That’s debatable - there are some very well-crafted post-colonial interpretations of the conquest narratives in Joshua that completely miss the point of the text, and the same can be said of many feminist readings of Christ’s passion narratives. Sometimes the methodology doesn’t really fit or do justice to the material being interpreted, and since interpretations are made on the basis of particular methodologies (whether implicit or explicit), the interpretations and methods rise and fall with one another.

But you misunderstand - I’m not saying that we should dismiss whatever Augustine or Athanasius or Irenaeus said on every interpretive matter. However, if their methodology is perceptible through arguments for a particular interpretation, and if their methodology is flawed, I am not going to hold that particular interpretation in esteem simply because of who offered it. An interpretation derived on the basis of a flawed methodology does NOT stand simply because of the clout of the theologian who offers it.
[/quote]
I think it’s more important that what they said be the truth rather than to get caught up in methodology you disagree with it now. No methodology is without bias. A method it merely a means to an end. What ultimately matters is the end and if the end is correct, what does it matter the methodology?
[/quote]

Whether what they said is true or not IS a question of methodology, Pat, particularly when we come to the interpretation of texts. If Augustine says that human beings should only be loved out of love for God, not because this belief has been handed down from the apostles themselves, but simply because Augustine subscribes to a Platonic view of the nature of the good and the appropriate relation of one to it, his reading of 1 Corinthians 13 is automatically suspect. How can we tell if Augustine’s meaning of “love” is identical with Paul’s unless we analyze the methods and presuppositions of both? In other words, you can’t determine if a particular interpretation is correct or not without looking at the method.

[quote]Pat wrote:
It enables us to discern what we think they meant. There is no guarantee that intense literary scrutiny will reveal a persons true meaning and true intent.
But then it brings me back to the Gen 1 problem. If we are scrutinizing every nuance of language and phrasing, how then are we to insert things that are not there?
[/quote]

Once again, there is more to context than merely language and phrasing; these are inextricably bound to cultural context. And moreover, genre criticism (which is what I’m arguing for in my reference to the stock image of the heavenly council in origin narratives) is part of literary analysis, just like attention to language and phrasing.

[quote] pat wrote:

[quote] kingkai wrote:
Not sure exactly what you are referring to here. Frankly, it sounds exactly like the point of contention - you want to believe that the additional meanings you and others have found in the text are legitimate, whereas I believe many of them derive from questionable interpretive habits and unfamiliarity with the contexts.
[/quote]

I simply say that there are problems, scenarios, conflicts within the texts that demand a resolution for their meanings. I do not believe simple context resolves them, they may help, but does not resolve the issue.
I do not consider biblical interpretation to be ‘case closed’ by any stretch of the imagination, especially by simply adding context or literary analysis. Having those tools mey resolve some pressure, but it also may create additional questions.
[/quote]

And I’m saying, as I said to Jaypierce, that 99% of the supposed problems and conflicts in the Scripture are resolvable either through attention to the literary context or through attention to the broader cultural context in which the texts were composed and in which the original audiences themselves lived. Since the texts were NOT written with YOUR comprehension in mind, they may use forms, metaphors, tropes, etc. that are foreign to your way of thinking.

[quote] Pat wrote:

[quote] Kingkai wrote:
I have answered this already - the Pentateuch does NOT speak to humanity in general. It, as with the rest of the OT Scriptures, speaks to us in so far as we too have been grafted in and participate in ongoing story of God’s chosen people, Israel. Thus it remains relevant for us despite having been written in terms and cultural codes understandable to particular generations of the chosen people.

There are similarities (in translation) between the Koran and the OT, and the Koran’s been preserved for centuries. Should we believe that God inserted those similarities into the Koran too?
[/quote]
I don’t know enough about the Koran to draw any conclusions about it.
[/quote]

You don’t NEED to know anything about the Koran to answer; the fact is that Judeo-Christian morality occasionally overlaps with moralities of other religious systems. There are certain forms of moral reasoning common across cultures; that doesn’t mean that God was necessarily involved in the formulation of those other moralities.

[quote] Pat wrote:

[quote] Kingkai wrote:
Again, God’s preservation of the biblical texts does NOT imply that he included more or hidden meanings in those texts.
[/quote]
I don’t know what you mean by ‘hidden meanings’. I am not asserting there are hidden meanings or codes in the texts. I am simply saying that as time goes on and as more tools become available to us, we are able to grasp a fuller meaning of what was written. Not ‘hidden meanings’.
I am not asserting hidden meanings, I am asserting a more complete understanding. The way you state that makes it sound like I am asserting a type of divination to the scripture. I am not playing the record backwards to find hidden meanings. That’s the disconnect I think.
[/quote]

“Tools” are not the same thing as “raw material.” When I say that a certain method - a tool - can help us better understand the biblical text, I’m not saying that this tool will unlock meaning unknown to ANYONE before. I’m saying that it can help me read a little more like the original audience for whom the texts were written would intuitively read. That’s VERY different from what you have claimed at different points to defend your Trinitarian reading, i.e., that the human author wrote a passage that was meaningless to him and his audience, which God intended to supply the cognitive information (“the raw material”) necessary for understanding later. That’s a hidden meaning, Pat; a meaning intentionally left unrevealed for a thousand years is a hidden meaning, in so far as it was hidden from a people group for their entire history.

[quote] Pat wrote:

[quote] Kingkai wrote:
Ok, now I think I understand what you were getting at with this, but it seems like you are putting a lot of weight on a particular historical reconstruction of the revelatory process. What i mean is, the apostles WERE Second Temple Jews, and it is entirely debatable how the apostles came to the conclusion that Christ was also God. The evidence does not suggest that this revelation was simply dropped from above; rather, it seems to have developed over the course of their ministries. Now if they came to the conclusion that it was in some sense fitting to identify God (the Father), Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit as “God,” nonchalantly and without explanation, then the question is whether they had categories to explain it. I want to suggest that they did, and their categories were not the same as those later Christians used in an attempt to understand their language.
[/quote]
I am figuring more that what they understood as God’s nature was a given and didn’t require a full explanation where that understanding got lost in later generations as the word was spread and understood through cultural paradigms. So as to why didn’t NT writers just state it that way? Well, perhaps they couldn’t imagine we’d be so dense as to need it broken down like that. They also didn’t seem to write in a way that would suggest that the world would last much longer.
[/quote]

You’re missing my point here, Pat. Given what we know about Jewish conceptions of God in the first century AS WELL AS the trouble the earliest Christians (also first century A.D.) had making sense of it themselves, the idea that the apostles would have held to essentially the Trinitarian formulations of the 4th-5th centuries and considered such formulations self-evident is ludicrous. The fact that we find ZERO evidence of strife between Christians and Jews over Jesus’ divinity until John’s gospel (circa 85 A.D.) suggests either (A) the apostles didn’t talk much about Jesus’ divinity with outsiders, or (B) the apostles had some other way of understanding it than the Trinitarian formulation.

Moreover, this is a VERY, VERY unCatholic argument on your part. If the understanding of the Trinity was lost as the gospel spread to Gentiles and only was recovered centuries later, why shouldn’t I suppose that the proper understanding of the Eucharist as a simple commemorative meal was lost among the Gentiles and MISTAKENLY interpreted as a sacrifice instead?

And for the record, the notion that the earliest Christians “didn’t think the world would last much longer” is a vestige of late nineteenth century biblical scholarship and holds no water today.

[quote] Pat wrote:
I don’t think that’s the case. Maybe for some, but for others, they did consider their influences. The Aristotelian methodology is actually a good tool to use for eliminating that weakness. What they did not have was perfect linguistic analysis. It just wasn’t there en masse. I don’t think you do away with one in favor of the other.[/quote]

It is the case - we have dozens of text from that time period illustrating that. I can’t fault them for that at a moral level; recognizing your situatedness in a particular time and place and the effects of your culture upon your thought patterns and assumptions is a pretty distinctively post-modern idea. But diversity without judgment wasn’t embraced by the church fathers or the culture in which they lived. There were only a handful of church fathers who paid attention to cultural context at all in their interpretations, and they were ALL in the relatively insignificant Antiochene tradition (Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, John Chrysostom). So you’re simply incorrect, Pat; their inattention to their own contexts and the effects this context had on them is evident from their arguments.

[Tiribulus]

You n I have to meet one day my liege. There is no way to do this online. Kamui HAS to be my next project post. I’ve owed it to him for months now.

[pat]

[quote]KingKai25 wrote:
There is something I think you are missing here - there are two different groups of readers we are talking about, and neither of those groups are “scholars of old, those prior to the NT.”

The first group is the scholars of the NT - I.e., the apostles who wrote the NT books and did exegesis of the OT. These WERE scholars prior to the NT. They were Second Temple Jews using many of the same hermeneutical methods as other Second Temple Jews! So you cannot simply dismiss arguments based on how Second Temple Jews would have read the text.

More importantly, the second group is the original audience Genesis 1 was intended for. I’ll try this in steps.

1. Once again, the doctrine of inspiration as understood by the earliest church precludes your argument that the human author of Genesis 1 did not know EXACTLY why and what he meant by including the plural in his portrayal of God’s speech in 1:26.

2. Consequently, he had an audience in mind for whom that revelation was originally intended, and given the language he used, his style, and his use of the tropes and genres only available to those of his own time period, the most likely audience is the one contemporaneous with himself.

3. Therefore, we have to ask how that audience would have read the text, because it was specifically written to be understood by them.

4. Since we have no evidence that those living before the last half of the first century A.D. thought of God as a trinity (and arguably, even those who did think of God as such - Christians - didn’t even have it fully worked out yet), it is probable that the Trinity was NOT part of the religious framework of the original audience of Genesis 1:26. In other words, they would not have filled in the gaps in the text (i.e., to whom else God refers in 1:26) with the Trinity; it would have required explanation in the text itself.

5. If that’s the case, then there HAS to have been a way of making sense out of Genesis 1:26 that employs ONLY the categories available to the original readers, those to whom the text was initially addressed.

6. And finally, if such an interpretation must therefore exist, there is no need at all for the Trinitarian interpretation of Genesis 1:26.

[/quote]
Perhaps not for the original audience, but I wholly disagree that you are to look at the texts as through the paradigm of the original audience. It’s important to know that view, but that’s not the same as saying “That view is correct and all others are wrong” by default. Simply because the original audience was close in culture, language and understanding does not make they’re reading of it right, by default. They had those advantages, but that in itself makes their interpretations right to the exception of others especially others with more scriptural information.

Going back the Gen 1 and then reconciling it with John 1, what then makes more sense? A heavenly counsel that is not mentioned, or a manifestation of God through whom all that exists was made and that without him, could not be made? John 1 tells us something about creation which Genesis did not. The plural self reference in Gen 1 becomes much easier to reconcile with the revelation of John 1.

First of all, I can turn this question right back at you. What makes more sense - that in a text written by a man before even the existence of God’s own SON Jesus was known, the author assumed his audience would recognize the divine council motif, a standard feature of the genre in which he was writing, as soon as he mentioned “us,” OR that he possessed a revelation of God’s plurality unknown to any Jews before OR after him and simply FORGOT to clarify both that the “us” God was referring to was Godself AND what God’s plurality entailed?

It may have been their assumption. It certainly was a problem they had to reconcile, however it does not entail that they were right. They also thought the earth was flat and buzzards were good to eat. What doesn’t make sense is the presence of a heaven counsel, even if they thought so.
Why turn the question around rather than answer it?

Secondly, Genesis 1:26 doesn’t NEED reconciled with John 1! It doesn’t need reconciliation because NO New Testament author EVER claims that Genesis 1:26 is a reference to the Trinity. ONLY if that were to occur (since the NT is an authoritative source) would I necessarily HAVE to read Genesis 1:26 as a reference to the Trinity. Once again, given the concept of representation which was part of the cultural context, John may have assumed that it was actually Jesus who did the creating in Genesis 1 (i.e., that the references to God as creator are references to the pre-incarnate Christ), or possibly that Jesus was indeed the “logos” through which God created the world, i.e., his actual spoken word.

If you want to treat each book as mutually exclusive, perhaps. But there is pressure place on Genesis by John 1 that has to be dealt with. If all things were ‘made through Him’ it stands to reason that Jesus was part and parcel to the creation process. And if that’s true, then we have to reconcile how that fits in with Genesis’s account of creation. God created everything through Jesus. The fact that early interpreters were not aware of that seems to me irrelevant now.

Based on the above, the concept of the Trinity is NOT necessary to understand Genesis 1:26; the burden of proof is actually on you to show that the Trinitarian interpretation is even a legitimate reading of Genesis 1:26 at all.

Like previously stated, John 1 puts Jesus in the process of creation. Now the Holy Spirit is not mentioned, but Jesus is. Most certainly, no counsel is mentioned. You talk about burden of proof, yet the only proof you are offering me is the potentially flawed understanding of the ancient Hebrews.
Because that’s what they thought, doesn’t make it so.

Pat wrote:
Kingkai wrote:
Regarding the Genesis example, I can say once again that, given the nature of the composition of literary texts in the ancient world, there are two really compelling possibilities. On the one hand, Genesis 1-2 could be a hodgepodge of hastily sewn together material reflecting widely diverse perspectives on the nature of the gods, and both the use of elohim (a plural noun) and the “us” language reflects the original polytheistic contexts of these passages. This is the dominant position among secular scholars, and the fact is that, for anyone who knows Hebrew, it is highly convincing. Why would I NOT choose that position over the view that God left a completely enigmatic statement in Genesis, a statement whose meaning and purpose within the narrative was unknown to the human author and only revealed centuries later to Christians who had a copy of John’s gospel and could read it in tandem with Genesis?

I really don’t see why not. There is much that God has revealed over time. Why wouldn’t God do just that. Reveal later what he meant by something earlier. Seems to me that God does this often especially with regards to prophecy. The prophets or the scholars don’t know what the prophecy is or means at the time of composition, but is revealed later when it has been fulfilled.
Certainly Jesus would not have been chucked from the Temple when he said “This prophecy has been fulfilled in your hearing” if they knew what it meant.

Your prophets analogy doesn’t work at all. First, prophecy is a completely different genre then narrative; you cannot compare an ostensibly directly spoken promise of God about a future act with a discussion of events that have already happened. Secondly, and more importantly, God didn’t write Genesis 1:26; a human being did under inspiration, a doctrinal term assumed by those who coined it to entail that the human being knew what he meant by what he wrote. Finally, according to 1 Peter 1:10-12, the prophets DID know that their prophecies were about Christ; they simply did not know the precise time or exact circumstances surrounding the fulfillment.

LOL! That’s mighty convenient. The prophesies were also written by people.

So before the books are all mutually exclusive on their own and now 1 Peter explains something in the OT? But John 1 cannot explain anything about Genesis 1?
I am well aware that the prophets knew who they were writing about. The symbolic nature implies they were at a loss for explaining it all. Indeed, and your probably going to say I am wrong about this too, we know more about Jesus’s early life from Isaiah than the Gospels. I.E, that he was a sickly person, was ordinary looking, or even that he was beaten beyond recognition.

And why wouldn’t God do that, you ask? Perhaps because it places us automatically above those who existed before Christ in spiritual stature. In other words, your question implies that God didn’t care if his chosen people Israel understood the Scriptures; he only cared if the people who lived after Christ understood the Scriptures. Genesis then wouldn’t really be revelation for the Jews; it would only be revelation for us. But even if that explanation fails to convince you, the fact remains that we have no evidence that God did leave gaps in the OT only to fill them in later, and in the absence of such evidence, we should be very wary of making claims about what GOD does or doesn’t do.

Oh brother! The way you misread what I say, or draw ridiculous conclusions from it does cause me to wonder a little. Are you doing that on purpose? Where in the hell are you getting that I am ‘implying’ God didn’t care about his chosen people and whether they understood the scriptures. Why wouldn’t Genesis prophecy a little too about Jesus, as Moses did?

I basically answered this above. Your argument is that, given that the text does not explicitly state that either a council or the Trinity is the referent, and we have references to Jesus’ agency in creation, the Trinitarian reading makes more sense. My point is that, since Genesis is a high context document written as revelation to a specific group of people long predating the first century Jews and Christians, I have to come up with a reason why the explanation is left out. Since the heavenly council is a stock feature of origin accounts, it wouldn’t NEED to be explicitly laid out for them; the allusion to “us” could be sufficient code to make the message clear to the original audience. The Trinitarian reading, on the other hand, WOULD require explanation at ANY TIME before the late first century A.D. And once again, the NT Scriptures at no point prescribe how Genesis 1:26 is supposed to be read; John’s claim that Jesus was involved in creation does not constitute an implicit claim about the meaning of Genesis 1:26.

Where is this heavenly counsel a stock feature in the story of creation? I get the point already that the early interpreters thought this. I understand that they are considered ‘high context’ in that they are closer in time, culture, language, life style, etc. I still don’t see how any of that actually matters. Where is the first mention of this counsel, 1 King 22? Is there mention before that? Even so, that’s still a good bit away from Genesis. Why should we take an flying inference that requires a whole host of assumptions versus the more direct explanation that the scriptures actually say?

The scripture states nowhere that the ‘Heavenly Hosts’ were present or a part of creation. The scripture does state that God as Father and Jesus were part and present at creation. You’re expecting me to accept the interpretation of the scripture that the scripture does not actually say, over something the scripture does actually say?
What the scripture actually says without interpretation is that God made man in his image and that all things were made through Jesus. These things are stated explicitly.

You got a tough sale for me to accept that something that was mentioned some 9 books later was the co-participant in creation simply because the early Hebrews thought so.

And I’m not getting the relevance of Jesus’ “I Am” statements for this discussion. Could you elaborate?

Certainly, in statements like"
Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” The ‘I AM’ is capitalized, to make reference to ‘I AM that AM’

I didn’t mean I don’t know what references you had in mind; I simply meant I don’t know how they contribute to your argument. There’s really only one clear “I am” statement, and it’s the one you quoted. And even it is subject to varying interpretations, meaning it’s not so clearly an allusion to God’s self reference in Exodus as we would like to think. More importantly, Jesus’ self-identification as Yahweh here doesn’t mean that Jesus is necessarily reinterpreting the Exodus passage; it doesn’t necessarily imply that HE’s the one speaking in the burning bush. In fact, according to Acts 7, that was an angel functioning as God representative to Moses. Jesus’ is simply identifying himself with Yahweh, not prescribing a new interpretation of Moses’ call in Exodus.

Naturally!

I thought you were asking me for an example, I forgot why it even came up to be honest. Don’t feel like getting it to it. I am getting carpal tunnel as is.

Kingkai wrote:
That’s debatable - there are some very well-crafted post-colonial interpretations of the conquest narratives in Joshua that completely miss the point of the text, and the same can be said of many feminist readings of Christ’s passion narratives. Sometimes the methodology doesn’t really fit or do justice to the material being interpreted, and since interpretations are made on the basis of particular methodologies (whether implicit or explicit), the interpretations and methods rise and fall with one another.

But you misunderstand - I’m not saying that we should dismiss whatever Augustine or Athanasius or Irenaeus said on every interpretive matter. However, if their methodology is perceptible through arguments for a particular interpretation, and if their methodology is flawed, I am not going to hold that particular interpretation in esteem simply because of who offered it. An interpretation derived on the basis of a flawed methodology does NOT stand simply because of the clout of the theologian who offers it.

I think it’s more important that what they said be the truth rather than to get caught up in methodology you disagree with it now. No methodology is without bias. A method it merely a means to an end. What ultimately matters is the end and if the end is correct, what does it matter the methodology?

Whether what they said is true or not IS a question of methodology, Pat, particularly when we come to the interpretation of texts. If Augustine says that human beings should only be loved out of love for God, not because this belief has been handed down from the apostles themselves, but simply because Augustine subscribes to a Platonic view of the nature of the good and the appropriate relation of one to it, his reading of 1 Corinthians 13 is automatically suspect. How can we tell if Augustine’s meaning of “love” is identical with Paul’s unless we analyze the methods and presuppositions of both? In other words, you can’t determine if a particular interpretation is correct or not without looking at the method.

I am not actually a huge fan of Augustine. He was like a typical convert, over zealous… However, just because some interpretations may be suspect or wrong, doesn’t mean they all were. Likewise the ancient ‘high context’ interpretations, simply by being closer does not by default make them correct. Though I think you misinterperate what Augustine means by loving one another out of love of God. Since Jesus equates the two very closely, I wouldn’t say Augustine is that far off the mark.

“Tools” are not the same thing as “raw material.” When I say that a certain method - a tool - can help us better understand the biblical text, I’m not saying that this tool will unlock meaning unknown to ANYONE before. I’m saying that it can help me read a little more like the original audience for whom the texts were written would intuitively read. That’s VERY different from what you have claimed at different points to defend your Trinitarian reading, i.e., that the human author wrote a passage that was meaningless to him and his audience, which God intended to supply the cognitive information (“the raw material”) necessary for understanding later. That’s a hidden meaning, Pat; a meaning intentionally left unrevealed for a thousand years is a hidden meaning, in so far as it was hidden from a people group for their entire history.

And that will get you as far as they got. I did not imply, state, or otherwise infer “hidden meanings”. I resent the shallowness of that accusation. Understanding something differently when you have come in to more knowledge is not the same as ‘looking for hidden meanings’.

[quote] Pat wrote:
Kingkai wrote:
Ok, now I think I understand what you were getting at with this, but it seems like you are putting a lot of weight on a particular historical reconstruction of the revelatory process… used in an attempt to understand their language.

I am figuring more that what they understood as God’s nature was a given and didn’t require a full explanation where that understanding got lost in later generations as the word was spread and understood through cultural paradigms. So as to why didn’t NT writers just state it that way? Well, perhaps they couldn’t imagine we’d be so dense as to need it broken down like that. They also didn’t seem to write in a way that would suggest that the world would last much longer.

You’re missing my point here, Pat. Given what we know about Jewish conceptions of God in the first century AS WELL AS the trouble the earliest Christians (also first century A.D.) had making sense of it themselves, the idea that the apostles would have held to essentially the Trinitarian formulations of the 4th-5th centuries and considered such formulations self-evident is ludicrous. The fact that we find ZERO evidence of strife between Christians and Jews over Jesus’ divinity until John’s gospel (circa 85 A.D.) suggests either (A) the apostles didn’t talk much about Jesus’ divinity with outsiders, or (B) the apostles had some other way of understanding it than the Trinitarian formulation.

Moreover, this is a VERY, VERY unCatholic argument on your part. If the understanding of the Trinity was lost as the gospel spread to Gentiles and only was recovered centuries later, why shouldn’t I suppose that the proper understanding of the Eucharist as a simple commemorative meal was lost among the Gentiles and MISTAKENLY interpreted as a sacrifice instead?
[/quote]
Very un-Catholic? I never said it was lost as the Gospel spread to the gentiles! I said what may have been a ‘given’ in apostolic times was not as explicitly understood later. It’s not a loss of message. It’s a change of culture, the result of the grape vine, the invasion of heresy, the spreading of false gospels and false epistles, etc. All played a role in requiring an explicit dogmatic statement that should not be misunderstood.
I am puzzled at this to be frank. Why accuse me of being “uncatholic” if not to take a jab? If you think that was unCatholic, then you don’t know much about it.

[quote]

I don’t think that’s the case. Maybe for some, but for others, they did consider their influences. The Aristotelian methodology is actually a good tool to use for eliminating that weakness. What they did not have was perfect linguistic analysis. It just wasn’t there en masse. I don’t think you do away with one in favor of the other.

It is the case - we have dozens of text from that time period illustrating that. I can’t fault them for that at a moral level; recognizing your situatedness in a particular time and place and the effects of your culture upon your thought patterns and assumptions is a pretty distinctively post-modern idea. But diversity without judgment wasn’t embraced by the church fathers or the culture in which they lived. There were only a handful of church fathers who paid attention to cultural context at all in their interpretations, and they were ALL in the relatively insignificant Antiochene tradition (Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, John Chrysostom). So you’re simply incorrect, Pat; their inattention to their own contexts and the effects this context had on them is evident from their arguments.[/quote]

As if that information was widely available at that time… Even if they wanted to, they were lucky to have a translation of the scriptures. much less reams of historical references.

[Brother_Chris]

On the topic of the Bible. The Dominican Sisters of Mary, the Mother of the Eucharist won Foxworthy’s American Bible Challenge.

- YouTube

A good article about it and their comments are below:

http://www.thesacredpage.com/2013/03/who-says-catholic-dont-know-bible-nuns.html

[Tiribulus]

While I’m happy for you Christopher, I know a couple Jehovah’s Witnesses who could stomp n chew on just about anybody who would likely be on that show. Knowing tons of scripture is not the same as knowing scripture. I’m just being honest man.

[Brother_Chris]

[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
While I’m happy for you Christopher, I know a couple Jehovah’s Witnesses who could stomp n chew on just about anybody who would likely be on that show. Knowing tons of scripture is not the same as knowing scripture. I’m just being honest man.[/quote]

But, when you know scripture like these sisters. You know tons of scripture and you know tons of details about scripture.

Though that is neither hear nor there, because after meeting them a dozen times (when I’ve been in Ann Arbor or they came out to Flagstaff) they are very devoted disciples of Jesus Christ. Plus, the Dominoes guy bankrolled these girls.