Posted on 01/16/2011 4:09:10 PM PST by balch3
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) -- A Southern Baptist seminary president and evolution opponent has turned sights on "theistic evolution," the idea that evolutionary forces are somehow guided by God. Albert Mohler
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote an article in the Winter 2011 issue of the seminary magazine labeling attempts by Christians to accommodate Darwinism "a biblical and theological disaster."
Mohler said being able to find middle ground between a young-earth creationism that believes God created the world in six 24-hour days and naturalism that regards evolution the product of random chance "would resolve a great cultural and intellectual conflict."
The problem, however, is that it is not evolutionary theory that gives way, but rather the Bible and Christian theology.
Mohler said acceptance of evolutionary theory requires reading the first two chapters of Genesis as a literary rendering and not historical fact, but it doesn't end there. It also requires rethinking the claim that sin and death entered the human race through the Fall of Adam. That in turn, Mohler contended, raises questions about New Testament passages like First Corinthians 15:22, "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive."
"The New Testament clearly establishes the Gospel of Jesus Christ upon the foundation of the Bible's account of creation," Mohler wrote. "If there was no historical Adam and no historical Fall, the Gospel is no longer understood in biblical terms."
Mohler said that after trying to reconcile their reading of Genesis with science, proponents of theistic evolution are now publicly rejecting biblical inerrancy, the doctrine that the Bible is totally free from error.
"We now face the undeniable truth that the most basic and fundamental questions of biblical authority and Gospel integrity are at stake," Mohler concluded. "Are you ready for this debate?"
In a separate article in the same issue, Gregory Wills, professor of church history at Southern Seminary, said attempts to affirm both creation and evolution in the 19th and 20th century produced Christian liberalism, which attracted large numbers of Americans, including the clerical and academic leadership of most denominations.
After establishing the concept that Genesis is true from a religious but not a historical standpoint, Wills said, liberalism went on to apply naturalistic criteria to accounts of miracles and prophecy as well. The result, he says, was a Bible "with little functional authority."
"Liberalism in America began with the rejection of the Bible's creation account," Wills wrote. "It culminated with a broad rejection of the beliefs of historic Christianity. Yet many Christians today wish to repeat the experiment. We should not expect different results."
Mohler, who in the last year became involved in public debate about evolution with the BioLogos Foundation, a conservative evangelical group that promotes integrating faith and science, has long maintained the most natural reading of the Bible is that God created the world in six 24-hour days just a few thousand years ago.
Writing in Time magazine in 2005, Mohler rejected the idea of human "descent."
"Evangelicals must absolutely affirm the special creation of humans in God's image, with no physical evolution from any nonhuman species," he wrote. "Just as important, the Bible clearly teaches that God is involved in every aspect and moment in the life of His creation and the universe. That rules out the image of a kind of divine watchmaker."
Actually, John is a heavily interpolated book. Whether John had an agenda or interpolators, I don't know. Christians, like any other group, had an agenda, and still do.
You said you were unschooled, yet your answer betrays a bait.
Who was it that said, "they may be thugs but they are our thugs". That makes all the "difference"...
Latest findings indicate Hebrew was commonly spoken in the 1st century. Because an area has a dominant language does not mean it isn't multilingual. This would especially be true in the case of Hebrew. Apart from religious significance, many Jews were never exiled.
I don't recall the source, but there is also a theory that Jesus may have spoken mainly Hebrew.
I appreciate the quote. Appreciate this:
"But we have the mind of Christ." [1 Cor 2:16]
"for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you. [John 15:15]
Source?
Sources are legion on any search engine.
http://www.jcstudies.com/articleDetail.cfm?articleId=59
Jesus And The Holy Tongue
Author: Dwight A. Pryor
DID THE HISTORICAL JESUS SPEAK HEBREW? The supposition of New Testament scholars—indeed the virtually unchallenged assumption in Bible dictionaries and Gospel commentaries for well over a century—is that the native tongue of Jesus was Aramaic, not Hebrew.
That is beginning to change. The cumulative research of a generation of scholars living in the land of Israel, both Jews and Christians, strongly challenges this conventional conviction as outmoded and misleading...
...First, with the resurgent nationalism evoked by the successful Maccabean revolt a century and a half before Jesus, came a corresponding revival in Hebrew as the national language of the Jewish people. Second, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has confirmed that by the first century Hebrew was again a spoken language in Israel. The various documents, the vast majority of which are written in Hebrew, reflect a distinctive and developing Hebrew language in spoken as well as written forms...
Did I say it was repugnant? It was the way it was.
It does make a difference if legitimately God is behind it. I suppose there are good reasons, bad reasons, and Divine reasons for destroying a people.
Some say that Hiroshima was a good reason; I’ve not heard anyone argue that it legitimately was a Divine reason.
You didn't you hear what President Truman said about “the bomb” then?
“It (the atomic bomb) is an awful responsibility which has come to us. We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.” President Truman
There are certainly objections to Aquinas's Cosmological Argument (some I'm even fond of), but this wouldn't be one - by definition.
The problem of infinite regress is, briefly:
Each event must have a cause which must have a cause which must have a cause… If this goes on to infinity then you are always at an event which must have a cause, and never get its cause. You infinitely stay at an event for which there is no cause. And therefore all the other events in the chain of causation don't get caused. Every event is in a chain of events which has no cause.
Therefore there are no events. The logic against this is: since there are events, any argument resulting in infinite regress is false.
The First Cause (which Aquinas says is God) eliminates this infinite regress because it is - by definition - uncaused. It requires no previous cause, no chain, and therefore does not infinitely regress.
"Will you now admit that a molecule of Ice atop Mt Everest has lower entropy and higher potential energy than a molecule of water in the Indian Ocean? Yes or No?""
"Oh yes, Mr. Bill. Ice always has a lower entropy and lower [heat] energy level than water."
Dear Mr. Bill. A lower entropy and a higher potential energy are the same thing. When I say ice has a lower entropy, it is equal to your claim that ice has a higher potential energy. It's not that ice has a lower entropy *and* a higher potential energy. You are only describing one attribute of ice using two different terms. IOW, they are two different ways of describing the same thing.
I was talking about 2 different things. A lower entropy (or higher potential energy for you) and a lower heat energy due to the loss of the latent heat of freezing. Ice gives up huge quantities of heat energy when it freezes as the 'latent heat of freezing'. This means that ice will always have a lower heat energy than water, which is what I said. Your insistence that lower entropy equals higher potential energy is fine. You can define lower entropy as higher potential energy and it doesn't change what I said.
If restate my statement using your terms, my quote would read...
"Oh yes, Mr. Bill. Ice always has a higher potential energy and lower heat energy level than water."
I think maybe you are confused because entropy goes from lower entropy to higher entropy while potential energy goes from higher to lower, assuming you are describing the same system moving in the same direction in accordance w/ the laws of thermodynamics. They are simply two different ways of describing the 'direction' of one attribute of a system as it relates to entropy or 'potential energy'.
Are you confused because you think my reference to lower heat energy means a lower potential energy? Is that it? I thought I had explained that sufficiently, but apparently not. Hopefully now you understand.
"Oh yes, Mr. Bill. Ice always has a lower entropy and lower energy level than water."
"Liar."
Well, as anyone can clearly read, I surely didn't say that the entropy of snow and ice was higher than water. Your level of confusion is incredible.
The Golden Rule. Some call it the Silver rule: Do not do unto others what you wouldn't want done unto you.
Also called the principle of reciprocity - and is present in not just human cultures around the world, but in animals as well.
There's a huge, if not gigantic, moral, ethical and tactical difference between nuking a city to avoid a larger, protracted war, and the killing of an innocent child for absolutely no fault of its. In the Amalakite example, the animals were killed, in addition to the children.
Reasonable words from Pres. Truman. Different, though, than saying “God SPECIFICALLY orders it.” as Samuel was directed to tell Saul.
Yes, you are so right. Fortunately, at Hiroshima all the pets were spared via their tin foil collars.
You have a similar situation today with koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, which is still the liturgical language of the Greek Orthodox Church, and the Slavonic of the Russian and other Slavic Orthodox Churches, which was devised for Slavonic liturgy in the 9th century.
neither is spoken, but used in the religious environment and, just as Hebrew is related to Aramaic or vice versa, the same can be said of the other two. But no one really speaks them conversationally.
In America, most Jews don't speak Hebrew at home (specially not biblical Hebrew), but read Hebrew scriptures in Hebrew. The author also uses the example of the Essenes as proof that Hebrew was a spoken language. Essenes were a small sect which did not represent the general population of Palestine, and there are no documents that show the degree to which this may or may not be true.
Obviously Hebrew was not dead, at least liturgically, but we don;t know how much it was in use. Again, it is impossible to check up on the sources your article claims if they are not mentioned by name.
Your author also mentions Hebraisms in the NT but doesn't give any listing of them. But he neglects to mention numerous Aramaic words, names and references, such as Hosanna, Korbun, Mammon, Maranatha, Thomas, Cephas, Eli, Gethsemane, Golgotha, Akeldama, Abba, etc.
At any rate, the point of my mentioning Aramaic in reference to john 3;3 is that the pun the author of John is trying to portray is possible only in Greek (and that is even a stretch), and not in either Aramaic or Hebrew, which means that Jesus would be speaking sophisticated Greek to a member of Sanhedrin, which is, to put it mildly, a very unlikely and unusual gesture.
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