Ken Smith wrote:

[snip]

[Don wrote:]

We have yet to see how you interpret Genesis and how this interpretation meshes with the rest of the Bible and provides a basis for the Gospel and an effective theodicy. Come on, Ken, put your cards on the table, mate, and stop beating around the bush (to mix a couple of metaphors!). Or are you ashamed of your view of Genesis? I suspect you know that it does not stack up and that is why you are so reluctant to do this, preferring rather to cite as many ‘authorities’ as possible whose views also cannot withstand the light of Biblical evaluation. What is your view of Genesis, Ken? Myth? Theistic evolution? Framework hypothesis? Day-age idea? God’s days; not our days? It doesn’t matter as long as I don’t have to agree with Don? 🙂

Ken: I think that this is about the third time I’ve posted this. The two paragraphs in my Credo about scripture are:

D: I believe that in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments God has given us an authoritative disclosure of his character and will, his redemptive acts and their meaning, and his mandate for mission. I believe that since everything asserted by the divinely inspired authors must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted to put into the sacred writings for our salvation: anything which is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of anyone as an article of faith, nor to be regarded as necessary for salvation.

But this is double talk, since Ken regards the Bible as errant (that is the opposite of inerrancy, which he has argued against). So anything Ken disagrees with, he can dismiss as one of the errors that wasn’t meant to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, or not ‘for our salvation’. So Ken Smith becomes the authority over Scripture, arbitrarily deciding what he will or won’t believe.

K:

If Don has difficulties because I don’t mention Genesis specifically, I’m sorry, but I refuse to distinguish between Genesis and the rest of Scripture.

D:

But Ken does distinguish, that’s the problem. I assume, since Ken is a professed evangelical and Baptist, that he takes the account of Jesus’ death and bodily resurrection as historical (it really happened, i.e., that Christ was really physically dead and physically came back to life, left the tomb empty, retained wounds and ate fish). However, Ken apparently refuses to regard Genesis 1-11 (more?) as historical. And that is in spite of Jesus’ genealogy in Luke 3 (for example) tracing back to Adam.

Ken, was Jesus’ genealogy in Luke 3 put there ‘for our salvation’? Tribal people in PNG came to salvation when they heard the genealogy of Jesus, because they finally realized that Jesus was a flesh-and-blood human, not some ethereal spirit being. It’s in the Gospel of Luke, which was written ‘for our salvation’, wasn’t it? It also gives the basis for understanding Jesus’ role as the last Adam who came to save the descendants of the first Adam (Romans 5, 1 Cor 15); all salvation issues. So, if this genealogy is ‘for our salvation’ (Ken’s own credo), then what about Genesis, where Jesus’ ancestors are first recorded? Is Luke ‘without error’ because it relates to our salvation, but Genesis, which relates to the same salvation, is full of error?

The truth of Genesis thus ‘may be proved thereby’ because it connects with the matter of our salvation. This was the main point of my first post, made in several different ways, which Ken has skirted all around, avoiding the issue. This is right in Ken’s own credo. Ken should take Genesis as history, because our salvation depends on that history. It is Ken who drives a wedge between historical and doctrinal parts of Scripture, although the doctrine is based on the history.

And what about Hebrews 11, which lists Abel, Enoch and Noah among the heroes of the faith? What about Paul, who explicitly stated that God made Adam before Eve (1 Tim. 2)? Are these NT references errors because they cite the “non-historical” chapters of Genesis as if they were history?

K:

As far as the marked section above goes, apparently Don wants me to produce my own “Systematic Theology”, if I’m to cover all the points he has in mind.

D:

No, Ken, just answer the real biblical issues that I have raised. It should not be too hard, with all the reading of those ‘evangelical’ scholars that you have apparently done. 🙂 However, the big name evangelicals that you have cited actually do not answer the questions that I have raised. In fact, they also dodge the issues. They do this by treating Genesis in isolation to the rest of the Bible (as you apparently do).

Now, in spite of all the obfuscation about such things as just what comprises the canon of Scripture and the issue of original autographs, everyone agrees that Genesis is in there, so this has all been beside the point.

K:

Sorry, Don, but here I feel like Alister McGrath. After giving a lecture on the relationship between science and Christianity he was invited by a well-known secular publisher in England to put his thoughts down on paper for publication. He thought about it, and decided that he didn’t know enough theology to do justice to the subject.

So he spent the next 20 *years* studying theology, before he felt knowledgable enough to write.

He’s now started writing about science and religion, but during those 20 years he became very highly respected, and is now one of the best evangelical theologians on the world.

D:

In Ken’s opinion. All that study and McGrath still got it wrong! 🙂

K:

I simply don’t have the time to do this.

D:

Well, since Alister McGrath has apparently done all the hard work and explained how Genesis can be harmonized with the uniformitarian version of history (‘evolution’) and at the same time be consistent with the rest of Scripture (especially the Gospel), all Ken needs to do is summarize that for us. It should be a cinch for someone who has devoured ‘one of the best evangelical theologians in the world’. 🙂

But again, since Ken is a good evangelical and Baptist, I would have expected that he would embrace the Reformation (and Baptist) principle of the perspicuity of Scripture. The Reformation recovered the doctrine that Scripture was perspicuous, that is, understandable by ordinary people without needing an elite group to interpret it. Ken’s whole approach throughout this ‘debate’ has been to defer to authority (the elite) rather than actually say how he understands Scripture. Apparently, according to Ken, one needs a PhD in theology (or should that be science?), to understand Genesis. How does the ordinary man (perspicuity) understand Genesis? It’s pretty straightforward. But years of mind-numbing double-talk in academic theological study can expunge clear thinking from the mind of the ordinary person.

K:

But what I say in my “Credo” about scripture should be adequate as a starting point. If Don wants me to be specific about Genesis 1 I’ll dig out some notes I have on the literary structure of just that chapter, including the unique way the word “yom” is used in connection with numbers.

D:

I can guess that Ken is referring to the stuff from Rowland Ward. I can pre-empt that. See ‘The numbering pattern of Genesis’: http://www.answersingenesis.org/tj/v17/i2/numbering.asp This paper cites a Hebrew scholar to show that Ward (not a Hebrew scholar) is wrong; the numbering pattern actually reinforces the ordinary days understanding, contrary to what Ward claims. And I already gave the parallel with Numbers 7, where a numbered *sequence* of days clearly meant ordinary days, which no one disputes. And I have already shown that the grammatical structure of Genesis shows that it is straighforward history.

Blessings,

Don