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6 Back to BasicsLooking at the basis of my own faith in the God of the Bible. I even bought myself a new Bible as I have found this to be a good way to encourage myself in rereading. Over the last 3-4 years this has been gestating in my mind there have been a number of activities laid on by my church to encourage my review of the Christian side. A complete reading of the Bible in one year renewed my overview of the book but did not result in my feeling more convinced about its truth. If anything it raised questions about the justice. As well as Jephtha there are stories of genocide for example in I Samuel 15 that make your hair curl. Adolf Hitler was a Catholic and records in Mein Kampf that he believed he was doing God’s work in exterminating the Jews. The story in I Samuel 15 in which Samuel declares that the obstruction by the Amorites, centuries before, of the people of Israel in their journey to the promised land justified their extermination has more than a few parallels with Hitler’s invasion of the Sudetenland, or his attempt to eliminate the Jews. What validates Samuel and not Hitler? Anyone today who declared a God-given imperative to annihilate a race or nation including women and children would be regarded as criminally insane. (Except perhaps for the modern nation of Israel that is condoned in its persecution and attempt to destroy the Palestinians.) Why should we assume anything different about Samuel? Although we get a lot about Samuel in the Old Testament there is no really tangible evidence of his godliness or that he was a prophet except for bald unsupported statements to say he was these things no prophecies we can check have come to us. I lead a study in Romans thinking that by studying the book that traditionally Christians look at as the definitive exposition of the message of the Gospel I could reawaken my faith. The more I looked at Romans the less I found that was clearly explained. For instance Paul begins Romans with the diatribe against those who ignored God and then fell into homosexual relationships. Even John Stott an Evangelical commentator has to say he does not know whom Paul is referring to here. It is not Adam and Eve because they are documented as having normal relations in Genesis. Yet this seems to be the cause of man’s problem of sin. Sin itself is one of those concepts that does not seem to fit a literal translation of the term and appears to be more than just “missing the mark” but it is not given sufficient examples or specific definitions to be clearly defined. Thus sin can be anything those in authority don’t like and looking back on church history it has been. I know the succinct definition is not loving God and not loving your neighbour as yourself, but these are not always useful working definitions in that it is also described as if it were an influence or an attribute a bit like karma. I suppose what was niggling at me was the philosophical concept of evil as a proof of the existence of a god, which I will deal with later. For the moment I found the idea difficult because it seemed that sin as viewed in the Bible is not just a concept of human misbehaviour but also the condition of the world. The implication of Romans 8:21 is that the difficulties we encounter are a result of sin. Romans 8:21 and Genesis 3 imply that the tendency for things to decay and be difficult is a result of sin. But if the world has been like this since the beginning before man came along and sinned then these things have nothing to do with sin or God’s condemnation but are a part of the natural order of things. When I became a Christian it was all clear, sin had caused a separation between God and Man and Jesus had dealt with the problem, by paying the penalty with his death. But this begs the question, the penalty for what? Adam ate the fruit but Paul says that the people who followed Adam had a different sort of sin. He is not specific about how that worked and how someone else being punished absolves me of blame. John Stott explains in his commentary on Romans that we are to view the idea of sin as being tied to us collectively through Adam being our common ancestor (which is also the straightforward reading of the text). But if Adam is not a common ancestor but just a part of the myth to explain where we come from there is no ancestral sin no mater how contrived the connection to future generations and their supposed culpability. Romans 9 and 10 describe the way in which God runs the world. From these texts we get the problems of predestination. Paul describes how Pharaoh is used to demonstrate God’s ability to set up the outcome in that Pharaoh is directed to oppose the release of Israel. Even Paul sees the question “why does he then find fault?” Romans has some interesting ways of describing sin. It is seen as a transgression of the law but also as a personal attitude that is not directly tied to an individual “sin”. Also it is seen as an influence or property that has infiltrated the world. Paul talks of his personal struggle with a body bent on doing wrong and a mind knowing what is right but powerless in the sinful body. Presumably this idea expressed in chapter 7 influenced Descartes in his idea of mind-body dualism. At the end I was left with the feeling that far too much is in-filled by the correct Christian doctrines rather than read from the text. Reading John Stott’s commentary leaves one with questions about several passages with unclear meaning. Reading Blocher[11] and Lucas[12] was an attempt to understand Genesis in its cultural and Biblical context through committed Christians who did not just mindlessly chant the creationist mantras. Blocher’s best shot at demonstrating the divine inspiration of Genesis is to describe the poetry of the language used in the early chapters of Genesis as being divinely inspired. But they are just words the fact that they are well chosen does not confirm a divine origin they are human words after all. Moreover Adam may just be a myth adopted and adapted from the older epic of Gilgamesh of Sumerian or Mesopotamian origin what does that make sin? |