The Bible, Creationism, and Prophecy (part 2)

Safehands wrote: »

I disagree. If it was a literal event, then it happened and we should make of it what we will. In my opinion, it would show Abraham to be affected by Schizophrenia.
If it is not a literal event then it can be treated like any other myth or fable. We can analyse it to death, but at the end of the day we are analysing a fairy tale.

No, if it were a literal event, as described in the Bible, then it would not be schizophrenia since the Bible clearly says that God actually spoke to Abraham.

If you don't believe that the Bible is correct, then you really have no basis for believing it to be a literal event, for you reject the very source that says it happened.

It looks very much as if you're engaging in sophistry here.

Astrid Quick Case wrote: »

Were did I say that?
Its a literal event but its also a picture of another truth.
You see thats the problem with a lot of opponents to christianity and indeed many christians.
You don't understand the types and figures that are interwoven into the narrative.

If it was a literal event, then either Abraham heard voices from God telling him to carry out a horrific atrocity, or he thought he heard such a voice. Mystifying it by making highbrow statements like 'it is a picture of another truth' or that 'Isaac was the son of promise', may mean something to you, but it does not impress me, sorry.

Safehands wrote: »

If it was a literal event, then either Abraham heard voices from God telling him to carry out a horrific atrocity, or he thought he heard such a voice. Mystifying it by making highbrow statements like 'it is a picture of another truth' or that 'Isaac was the son of promise', may mean something to you, but it does not impress me, sorry.

If it was a literal event, the Abraham did hear voices from God, because that is what the text says and the text is literally true. If you think Abraham was suffering from delusions then you do not think the text is literally true.

Safehands wrote: »

If the text is 'literally true', as you say then God has commanded Abraham to do a wicked thing.

Yes, I agree. I just don't see any reason why you would think that the text was literally true, or that it is irrelevant, unimportant or meaningless if not literally true.

Safehands wrote: »

The bible also says the following, in Deuteronomy 22;
"22:23 If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her;
22:24 Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city."

In Exodus 21:17 We are told: “Whoever curses his father or his mother shall be put to death."

Are these texts also true?

Well, you would have to understand "true" in a different sense here, wouldn't you? The stament "Safehands came into the room" can be historically true (or false) in a sense that that the instruction "Come in, Safehands!" can't. I don't think true/false is a terribly helpful way of analysing ethical instructions.

Safehands wrote: »

I think you know perfectly well what I mean when I asked were these true statements. There is no need to engage in a semantic debate.
These passages are written in the Bible. Are they to be followed as written, simple really?

It's not a semantic debate at all. You are talking about two different categories of communication. One is narrative (which can be assessed as true or not in the sense that it happened or didn't happen). The other is a command.

Christians do not believe that the passages you mentioned are to be followed as written. They were for Jews thousands of years ago, and do not apply to Christians (or indeed anyone else) today.

Safehands wrote: »

If you exclude or interpret any passages because there is no defending them, then every passage can be open to similar treatment

Christians don't exclude those verses because 'there is no defending them'.

They see them as non-binding because there are numerous passages in the New Testament that explain that the Old Testament law was fulfilled with the coming of Christ and so is not to be observed by Christians.

If you were to read the Book of Galatians in the New Testament then you might get the idea a bit better.

tommy2bad wrote: »

However this doesn't address the central point, that God ordered/commanded a wicked thing. Either He did or He didn't. If as you say, He did and then changed the rules His morality is arbitrary based on nothing more than expediency. If He didn't then what was going on that led people to think that God would approve of killing people for minor transgressions? Either someone was making it up as they went along or God is capricious and fickle. Closer to Zeus than Christ.

Well if that was anyone's central point up to this point it certainly wasn't worded in a way to make that clear.

If we're talking about Abraham here, then God ordered him to do something which we now know to be wicked (but it's far from clear that Abraham knew it to be wicked). However, it seems clear that God had no intention of allowing him to carry out the act, but was using it to develop his faith.

The New Testament tells us (in Hebrews Chapter 11) that Abraham came to the point of believing that God could raise Isaac from the dead - and that was an important step in the development of the Father of Faith.

Also, the incident with Isaac would be a powerful teaching tool for the Israelites to prepare them for the central point of God's dealings with man - the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ.

I've never quite understood why atheists and other non-Christians pretend to be so outraged about the Abraham/Isaac story. No real harm was done to anyone, and there were a number of very real benefits.

Safehands wrote: »

"The incident" as you call it, would be worthy of a long prison sentence in any civilised world. Some teaching tool! God telling a man to butcher his son!

Now who's playing at semantics? It was an event, an occurrence, an incident.

Nobody got butchered (except a ram).

I cannot understand how some Christians cannot see how awful the story is. If portrayed accurately in a movie it would warrant an 18's cert, because it is sick and depraved, and you cannot see anything wrong with it?
No physical harm may have been done, but Isaac would have been quite traumatised

An 18 cert for talking about a killing that doesn't actually occur? Yeah, right.

If, as seems likely, Isaac was a strapping young man of 20 years old or so, then he lived in a world where violence and death were commonplace. Any trauma caused by this event was hardly the crime of the century.

Safehands wrote: »

"The incident" as you call it, would be worthy of a long prison sentence in any civilised world. Some teaching tool! God telling a man to butcher his son!

I cannot understand how some Christians cannot see how awful the story is. If portrayed accurately in a movie it would warrant an 18's cert, because it is sick and depraved, and you cannot see anything wrong with it?
No physical harm may have been done, but Isaac would have been quite traumatised.

What's your point? The story is horrifying, and depending on how it was handled a film depiction might well receive a restrictive classification. So what? Is that a serious objection to the notion that the story might have some true or valid meaning? Do you believe that moral and philosophical concepts are automatically invalidated if expressed in ways that don't meet Walt-Disney-like standards of wholesome family entertainment?

Nick Park wrote: »

I obviously agree that human sacrifice is abhorrent, that it was a distinctive of Judaism that they repudiated it, and that God forbids human sacrifice many times in the Old Testament- but I don't think that is the intended main message of the Abraham/Isaac story. If so, then one would have to conclude that the story is told very badly indeed.

The central message of the story for the first readers of Genesis would initially appear to be one of faith and trust - even when you're not sure where things are going to end up. This faith and trust, incidentally, is displayed by both Abraham and Isaac - it being fairly clear that the son is old and strong enough not to be unwillingly tied down by an elderly father.

Then, with progressive revelation through the rest of the Old Testament, we get to see that the story is a foreshadowing of something bigger, with continual sacrifices of animals being made in a Jerusalem Temple that was built on the same Mount Moriah where Abraham sacrificed the ram as a substitute for his son.

The New Testament, of course, take the progressive revelation and meaning of the story further. Now we see that the animals are themselves simply a foreshadowing of an act whereby God does what He refused to allow Abraham to do - to sacrifice His Son. Only now the ram is not a substitute for Isaac, but Jesus is a substitute for sinful mankind.

Hebrews Chapter 11 throws further light on the story by revealing that Abraham so trusted the promises God had earlier given him that he believed, even if Isaac had died on the mountain, that God would raise him from the dead.

Actually this make's it worse. God using people as characters in a tale He is telling someone not even born yet! Talk about puppet masters!
Do you really believe that God put Abraham and Isaac through this so He could add another chapter to the story?

Nick Park wrote: »

This story, then, is rich in meaning to do with the central themes of the Bible - faith, obedience, salvation and the answer to the problem of sin. To reduce it to nothing more than a message against human sacrifice is, in my opinion, to massively miss the point.

And, as I said earlier, it's hard to believe that anyone who doesn't believe the Bible anyway really feels any genuine outrage over poor Isaac's trauma. Does anybody really get worked up over the feelings of a person they don't believe existed, who was a willing participant in an incident that they don't believe really happened? I think not.

You are right reducing it to a story that says human sacrifice is bad doesn't do it justice but equally presenting it as a moral tale is just as wide of the mark.
As I said previously, it's another example of mans developing understanding of God's will. I don't think any angel appeared to Old Abe, Abe realized that it was wrong in a way profound enough to make Him abandon human sacrifice, unlike his predecessors. Who in your version partook in legitimate human sacrifice, asked for and approved of by God.

Nick Park wrote: »

I obviously agree that human sacrifice is abhorrent, that it was a distinctive of Judaism that they repudiated it, and that God forbids human sacrifice many times in the Old Testament- but I don't think that is the intended main message of the Abraham/Isaac story. If so, then one would have to conclude that the story is told very badly indeed.

The central message of the story for the first readers of Genesis would initially appear to be one of faith and trust - even when you're not sure where things are going to end up. This faith and trust, incidentally, is displayed by both Abraham and Isaac - it being fairly clear that the son is old and strong enough not to be unwillingly tied down by an elderly father.

Then, with progressive revelation through the rest of the Old Testament, we get to see that the story is a foreshadowing of something bigger, with continual sacrifices of animals being made in a Jerusalem Temple that was built on the same Mount Moriah where Abraham sacrificed the ram as a substitute for his son.

The New Testament, of course, take the progressive revelation and meaning of the story further. Now we see that the animals are themselves simply a foreshadowing of an act whereby God does what He refused to allow Abraham to do - to sacrifice His Son. Only now the ram is not a substitute for Isaac, but Jesus is a substitute for sinful mankind.

Hebrews Chapter 11 throws further light on the story by revealing that Abraham so trusted the promises God had earlier given him that he believed, even if Isaac had died on the mountain, that God would raise him from the dead.

This story, then, is rich in meaning to do with the central themes of the Bible - faith, obedience, salvation and the answer to the problem of sin. To reduce it to nothing more than a message against human sacrifice is, in my opinion, to massively miss the point.

And, as I said earlier, it's hard to believe that anyone who doesn't believe the Bible anyway really feels any genuine outrage over poor Isaac's trauma. Does anybody really get worked up over the feelings of a person they don't believe existed, who was a willing participant in an incident that they don't believe really happened? I think not.

Thanks for this, Nick. A few thoughts:

I don’t think there’s any doubt that, for the culture that first told this story, and that culture that handed it down orally, and the culture that, in time, wrote it down and edited into the form that we know, and the culture that received it as revealed by God, the story did make a point about human sacrifice, if only because they knew that neighbouring cultures practices human sacrifice and they themselves did not. I don’t think there’s any inconsistency between the idea that the story is about human sacrifice, and the idea that the story is about trust; it can be about both, and in fact the Hebrew scriptures - I don’t need to tell you this - are typically richly layered in meaning.

The history unfolded in the Pentateuch shows the people of Israel - and their proto-Israelite ancestors - gradually coming into a closer relationship with God, expressed through a series of covenants. The closer relationship involves a growing (but, of course, always imperfect) understanding of the nature and person of God, and of what He wants and hopes for his people, and from his people. It seems to me that, historically speaking, it’s likely that there was a point or period where the proto-Israelites discerned that God did not desire human sacrifices, but the corollary is that there was an earlier time where they didn’t have that understanding. And that’s a difficult transition for any culture to make; once you have intentionally killed somebody - especially your own children - in the belief that this was morally justified or morally required, it’s really, really difficult to acknowledge that you were wrong to do so. (This doesn’t just apply to human sacrifice. People who fight in modern wars face exactly the same issue.) So among the stories the Israelites would need to tell themselves is a story to help them deal with this; to explain how they moved from thinking that God did want human sacrifice to understanding that He did not. And the Abraham -and-Isaac story looks a lot like that story.

Leave aside for a moment the trust that Isaac displays (though I agree that’s an important element of the story). Abraham displays trust on two occasions. First, he trusts his perception that he is called to sacrifice Isaac. Secondly, he trusts his later perception that he isn’t. On an individual level we might see the second act of faith as not so great; it must come as a huge relief to find that you don’t have to kill your own child. Who would find embracing that insight a challenge? But if we see Abraham as representative of the people at large it’s not so straightforward, because the likelihood is that over time they had killed a fair number of their children, and now they are asked to trust in a new insight which means that all the pain, all the grief, all the sacrifice involved in that was for nothing; that they have done dreadful things, horrifying things, things from which one averts the mind, for entirely bogus reasons. So I don’t think there’s any tension between the story being about trust in God, and the story being about discerning what God wants. It’s got to be both.

On a separate point, I entirely agree with you that as Christians we read this story in the light of the Gospels, and therefore find layers of meaning in it that, read in isolation, do not appear. But we have to accept that the people who framed this story, and told and retold it, and wrote it down, and received it as inspired scripture, knew nothing of the Gospel and didn’t (and couldn’t) read it this way. (And today’s Jews still don’t read it this way.) And unless we think the scripture was not intended for them - and I don’t think Christians can think that - I think we must conclude that the insights to be had from reading this scripture without the Gospel are just as much inspired revelation as those that we get by reading it in light of the Gospel.

And,as for outrage, yes, this is manufactured for ideological reasons. A world which can take the grotesque and graphic violence of Game of Thrones as wholesome entertainment can certainly take a text like this, intended to make a theological point, in its stride. There’s lots of offensive messages in Christianity - the Cross is a radical outrage against the faith of our age in power, wealth and violence. At worst, this story just clashes with our notions of what is suitable to be shown on television before 9 p.m.

tommy2bad wrote: »

While you don't directly say this, it inherent in the story itself. Why have it at all if human sacrifice wasn't a thing? If as Perigrinious says it was other tribes that had this ritual then it would have been sufficient to leave it at that, no need for God to intervene with a cruel stunt to make a point. I think the fact that their is a story marking a break with human sacrifice clearly shows that human sacrifice was a thing.
Of course we are working with the uncertain assumption that the Hebrews were monotheistic and followed the same God we do. I doubt this too. We see Moses destroying an idol after receiving the 10 commandments. I doubt the Hebrews turned to the gods of another tribe but rather regressed to some god they previously worshiped. Not that I'm ruling out adoption of other tribes cultures either. Just more likely they fell back to old ways.

In the biblical history, Abraham is the father of the Jewish people. He comes from Ur of the Chaldees (a real city in what is now the South of Iraq). Late in life - he is said to be 75 years old when this happens - he has a vision in which God tells him to leave his country and his extended family and go to Canaan, and God promises him that he will be the father of a great nation. The nation concerned in the Jewish people, Abraham is the father of the Jewish people and nobody before Abraham is regarded as Jewish. God's promise to Abraham is not the only covenant recorded in the Hebrew scriptures, but it's one of the key ones, and it's regarded as the foundational covenant for Judaism.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Abraham - whether we take him as a human individual or as the prototype of the Jewish people - came from, and broke away from, a non-Jewish culture, and in doing so founded Judaism. It's not a given that that breaking away included abandoning a practice of human sacrifice, but it's entirely possible, given that the cultures surrounding Judaism continued to practice it. Likewise before his covenant with God Abraham (or the people he stands for) may well have been a polytheist and/or an idolator.

Nothing in the Jewish concept of the people of Israel being God's chosen people involves God punishing non-Jews for not being Jews.

Nitpick 1: We don't know how Akhenaten died. We have no reason to think he died violently, still less that his death was in any way connected with his religious policy.

Nitpick 2: Freud's theory's about the origins of Judaism are interesting for the light they through on Freudian psychology, but I don't think many modern academic historians of the period think they have much basis in historical fact.