Christina, It’s lovely to see your work here, and you can see how great a job you did at laying out these issues by the amount of debate/conversation your thoughtfulness generated. Thanks for communicating these challenges so clearly. I hope you keep writing and translating your academic work into public forums such as Sabbath School discussions. :). Our church is better for your contributions.
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i think this response evinces the crux of the problem with your approach, as i and many others see it…while it is true that the author of Genesis, whom we have reason to believe was moses, would certainly have been steeped in ANE thinking, it doesn’t follow that it is necessarily true, as you imply, that this inspired text was restricted to addressing Moses’ and his audience’s concerns and issues…this is because inspired writing is more than the product of human input…as you likely know, our prophet defines inspiration as a combination of human and divine effort and action…
in view of this dual authorship, are you prepared to say that the HS, the divine agent in the production of Genesis, was limited by ANE cosmology, and unaware or uninterested in what the text had to say to future readers with a modern scientific outlook…your fixation on what you think Moses, but especially his audience, would have understood suggests as much, in which case, you might as well concede that you don’t approach Genesis as an inspired text, but as an ancient manuscript to be accessed merely in order to glimpse, as fully as possible, the thinking of moses’ time, and for whatever value you’ve convinced yourself attends such an effort…
let me be clear: a valid consideration of an inspired text of any kind, while it places importance on the knowledge access and experience of the human writer, and in the tradition of the NT’s treatment of the OT, must place supreme importance on the divine intent in the text, to the extent that that divine intent has been revealed and can be understood…as the NT clearly shows, this divine intent doesn’t need to be understood or even suspected by the writer or the original readers…it merely needs to be accessed by an audience through a contemporary inspired agent, who doesn’t necessarily need to show any concern for the original meaning…
in the case of the Genesis account of a six-day fiat creation, followed by a seventh day of rest, we see that the salient facts - the order of creation, the time length involved, etc. - isn’t dependent on ANE cosmology, or even modern scientific cosmology…attempts to stretch 24-hr periods into millions or even billions of yrs, or question the order of creation, as is common with some adventist evolutionists, doesn’t appreciate the fact that moses isn’t outlining a process that continues in our time, and is therefore subject to physical laws and rates we see all around us now…rather, what is uniquely evident in the Genesis account is that a divine godhead conspired to create matter and life out of nothing, and in a way that decisively challenges any scientific reality we can know of today, or would have been operational in any sectors in ANE times…the Genesis account of fiat creation outlines a one time supernatural event…it hasn’t happened on any level since…
this creation account, written in ANE terms, requires naked belief, unpropped by anything that can bridge any gaps in understanding between then and now…the facts of the account, as alluded to, are independent of the understanding of the time in which it was written…like the account of the resurrection of jesus, there is no way to predicate belief on any effective explanation in terms that we can access…we are confronted with the stark choice to believe what is essentially unbelievable…
i have to tell you, frank, that i haven’t seen evidence that you understand that this is what the biblical account of earth origins requires…that is, i don’t think you’ve pinpointed in your mind the significance of what the Genesis account has required from believers of all ages…and if you can’t bring yourself to successfully navigate this first step, what can you be expected to do with the resurrection account, or any of the chronicled miracles of jesus…for that matter, what can you be expected to do with the supernatural gift of the new birth, which cannot be explained or defined in terms of anything outside of it…
by insisting that the Genesis account must be relegated to ANE cosmology, which we know isn’t factual, you are effectively attenuating what is arguably the greatest miracle of the godhead of all time into something that could not have occurred…you are robbing the divine creation of earth and its living things of its undeniable greatness, mysticism and potentially transforming power…why don’t you put a rock beat to beethoven’s pastoral symphony and be done with it…
No, the greatest miracle is Jesus, his life, death and his resurrection. This is what the NT centers on.
Secondly, you make claims for the way the text works by reading a theological viewpoint into it that isn’t there, and assume things about the way inspiration works that it doesn’t. God is not the author of the text. He inspired the writers who were the authors. Those writers wrote to audiences in terms they could all understand. God, in his graciousness, met them where they were, and revealed himself according to their understanding. This is what makes the Bible incarnational. God communicated truth to human beings in truly enculterated ways. Thus, the Bible writers and the writer of Genesis weren’t writing to us. It simply wasn’t written to communicate anything about modern science to us.
This means that the Bible was written for us, but not to us. Our task is to then understand what it meant for the original audience, as best we can, before we apply its meaning to ourselves. It is akin to reading someone else’s mail, and trying to ascertain what the writer was trying to convey and what it meant for its original recipients. This in no way destroys the authority of a text like Genesis 1. Its authority does not rest on the idea of it being an accurate, post Hubbel scientific account of creation. It is not. It was never meant to be.
For you to try and read that into the text creates totally indefensible issues. Its cosmology is simply ANE cosmology. To try to claim that an accurate, modern cosmological account is also embedded in the text is to make claims that just cannot be supported by the text itself. To try and cherry pick from the text what you think is universally accurate scientifically, while ignoring the rest is also distorting and misusing the text. One either takes it seriously as a whole, or one is simply using it for a pretext to prove an agenda.
The text claims that there were three days and nights before the sun was in the sky. You cannot claim that the light of God took the place of the sun before it existed, the text itself makes no claim like that. The text says that the sky was an expansive dome that separates the waters of chaos above from the waters below. The dome protected human beings from those waters. God also hung the heavenly bodies in the dome, with those bodies rotating around the land. If one takes seven literal days as a literally accurate scientific description of creation, one can’t simply toss these other elements aside as not. It is cherry picking for ones own ideological agenda. I could go on.
The problem, as you say, is what is the divine intent of the text. It was not in giving a modern scientific account of creation. It gave an account that was understood by its original audience. They would not have understood what we do, nor is there any evidence that both cosmological views are embedded in the text. That would simply be a circus like manipulation of the text to suit our own thinking. This is what fundamentalism attempts to do. This is why it is indefensible.
The authority of the text and its intent was to establish that God created the material creation. That through creating he brought order out of non order, and form and function to what was formless and functionless. That he created humans to be more than what he created them from. That he created humans to wisely manage his creation, thus bearing his image and wisdom into all creation. That he created a mysterious bond between the divine and human realm, and that he would dwell with and reign through his human image bearers within his material creation for the flourishing of all.
It is a Hebrew poetic account in ways they would have understood, not in ways that accurately match our own cosmological understanding. To bypass the original intent, as if it’s meaning can just be discarded and a new cosmological paradigm read into it, is to simply do violence to the text, and to not take it seriously on its own terms. One can then read into the Bible whatever one wants to read into it. It is this type of literalism that actually diminishes the Bible and its authority, and doesn’t truly take it seriously on its own terms.
The authority of the creation account rests on what it tells us about God, and his intent and purpose for human beings and his creation, not in what it says about science. It is not an account of how God scientifically created, but of his purpose in creation. It makes faith claims, not modern scientific claims.
We would do well to respect those differences.
Frank
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i don’t believe this is the stated or concealed purpose of GRI…my understanding is that they are using the scientific method to corroborate many of the claims of the bible…and they’ve had success, which cannot be denied…in my view, they are compelling evidence that one does not need to be in scientific denial in order to be a bible believing adventist…
as for the seventh-day sabbath, it hardly needs GRI corroboration…it is a plainly stated fact in the earliest inspired texts…what aspects of how do you think need any explanation by science…
… that it was day number 7 in a series of 7 literal days.
well, that’s what the inspired text says, whatever moses thought of the universe…it’s something one either believes, or not…but what cannot be maintained is that this isn’t what the text says…
if you mean that the seventh day of the week cannot be determined, i think we can safely assume that it means the seventh day in our individual context…remarkably, the world is still built around a seven day weekly cycle…
Not really. The Bible nowhere says that there were any sabbaths before the Exodus. In fact, the Bible explicitly declares that the seventh-day sabbath did not exist before Horeb.
The Lord made not this covenant [the ten commandments] with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day.
And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched out arm: therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day. (Dt 5:3, 15)
So why do we try to move the sabbath back to Genesis? Evidently, TRADITION AND ELLEN G. WHITE.
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No, I’m not going to argue with you about which is the correct way to determine the seventh day, despite the fact unless you can determine what was meant by the seventh day in the Bible, any day, even Sunday, could be the seventh day “in our individual context”- depending on when you start counting. No, neither am I going to give you a lesson on literary devices and genre. Neither am I going to point out which parts of the Bible we conveniently determine to be symbolic and which we take literally. In any case, nice to see you back.
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You mean that all the fuss we have made about when to keep the sabbath boils down to an assumption?!
Since in some European countries (France and Scandinavia, etc), the seventh day of the week is Sunday, are SDAs there submitting to the beast by worshipping on Saturday?
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because that’s where we find it…
nope, that isn’t it…it’s in cases where there’s uncertainty that i think assuming what’s reasonable is the right course…keep in mind that an assumption can require a level of thought and logic…it isn’t a necessarily mindless exercise…
there’s a choice being made to ignore local designations…but keeping the seventh day in a local context, whenever that day falls, is acceptable in my view…the point is keeping the seventh day, whatever that means in whichever area one finds oneself…
in some of canada’s remote northern regions, daylight can last for 24hrs, or more…in these cases, obviously clock time sabbath observance makes sense…
i haven’t been anywhere…just very busy 
ok but the fact still remains that stressing what the original writer meant, and what his audience would have understood, is not the method of interpretation the bible itself illustrates…you may see all kinds of wonderful designs in this approach, but at the end of the day, it represents your opinion, nothing more…
what the bible shows us, instead, is inspired individuals calling out meanings in ancient inspired texts that the original writers and their hearers and readers could not have suspected, much less understood…examples of this in the NT are numerous…it isn’t an isolated occurrence…in fact we have no NT citations of the OT that doesn’t follow this approach…let me repeat: we have zero examples in the NT where citations of OT texts rely on textual and other analyses in order to understand original writer intent and audience understanding as a means of understanding the text…
in fact we have in the book of Daniel, arguably the most important book in the OT, an explicit reference to a lack of understanding on the part of the author of what was witnessed in supernatural vision, and presumably written in the form we have now…does a careful assay of language and culture to uncover author intent and audience understanding change the fact that the writer didn’t know what he was talking about…the answer to this question is no…
in the final analysis, scripture, and other inspired writing, doesn’t belong to the person through whom it was expressed, nor does primary meaning rest in what that writer was in a position to understand…it belongs and rests to and with the HS that inspired it, and it is his prerogative through whom, and when, he will reveal it…it is left to us to seek to understand as much as we can, using whatever means we think can assist, certainly…but in the end we have to humbly bow before the phenomenon of inspiration and accept what it reveals to us, whether that revelation conforms to any expectation we may have on what was or is meant…
i suspect there are other texts in Daniel, besides Daniel 8:14, where a prophet will lead us into a fuller understanding that wasn’t suspected at the time it was written, or even now…this is the greatness of inspiration…it is an infinite phenomenon…it operates wholly outside of our ability to qualify or quantify…inspired writing is an example of an infinite, all-knowing god unfolding meaning when and how he chooses…the best we can do is gratefully accept that meaning when and through whomever it is given…
You seem to be saying that the OT was largely unintelligible to its original recipients. You use one instance in Daniel as the test case. You also use the NT fulfillments of OT quotations as proof. You are also making the same case for Revelation in the NT. Thus your defense for their being all types of info in Genesis 1 that that ancient Hebrews would not have even understood.
I just can’t agree with this assessment. It doesn’t take into account the type of interpretive method that the NT writers were largely using. It was midrash. It’s assuming that the method itself was inspired. I can’t agree with that. They were inspired writers using their own methods of their time and culture to prove that Jesus was the messiah who fulfilled Israel’s story from the scriptures. That does not leave us with the liberty to handle the Bible in the same way. The message was inspired, not the interpretive method.
What you are advocating leaves interpretation of the text with no controls whatsoever. The inspiration of the spirit can be used as an excuse for reading whatever we want into the text, because what it meant in its original setting means next to nothing.
It also elevates the proof text method/the Bible as its own interpreter to the place of supreme guide. This also has little to no regard for context. Adventism is built upon manipulating the Bible in this way. It is another form of eisegesis. You have learned well.
Frank
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This is an excellent, interesting discussion, and I appreciate learning here.
I’m hearing today that the NT writers used the Septuagint in their understanding of the OT prophecies. My understanding is that the Septuagint was a very inaccurate translation of the OT.
So what then does this suggest about the accuracy of those NT “fulfillments”?
Why would the HS lead NT writers to mistranslate the OT for the purpose of authenticating a NT messiah?
Inspiration seems like such a messy thing indeed!
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