Post by Matthew JohnsonPost by B.G. KentB - Only if you take the Bible literally..will this idea mean anything to
you.
Not true. It is not necessary to take it literaly to see how brilliantly Gen 1-4
expresses the current fallen state of Man.
But those who do so fail to recognize the fact that it necessarily
destroys the authority of Scripture. It is beyond imagination that God
would reveal a fact or doctrine to an individual mind and do nothing
toward securing an accurate statement of it both in its authorship and
in its providential care through the coping of the text. It is much
more natural to suppose that a prophet or an apostle who has received
directly from God a profound and/ or mysterious truth, inaccessible to
the human intellect apart from the illuminating work of the Spirit,
will not then be left to his own unassited powers in imparting what he
has received. Especially is it improbable that confirment of
revelation from God would be veiled in a husk and kernal shell game.
The nature of special revelation, as separate from inspiration, is
that it is something quite beyond the scope of the teaching of general
revelation let alone human reasoning. For instance, the vicarious
nature of Christ's atonement. The doctrine of a personal atonement won
by another is completely outside of natural religion. Natural religion
cannot extend beyong "The soul that sins will die" (Eze 18:4) nor
beyond feelings of guilt and impending wrath. But the revelation of
Scripture is that Christ "was made a curse for us" (Gal 3:13 and that
He "Is the propitiation for our sins" (1 Jn 2:2) is beyond man left to
himself. Whether God will pardon sin and in what way He will do it can
not be determined by a priori reasoning. The only historical statement
respecting the fact that God will forgive sin is that of God Himself
declaring it and performing it. There may be conjectures and hopes in
regard to divine mercy, but nothing certain apart from the Scriptures.
And this applies to Gen 1-4. The fact that a skeptic can ask a
question that the Biblicist cannot answer is not proof that the
skeptic's own position is the truth or that the Biblicist is wrong.
The weight of burden falls not on the Biblicist but on the skeptic to
prove the literal rendering wrong. And any thesis that presumes that
it can discern which historical, geographical or chronological record,
in the middle of which just so happens to be doctrinal elements, is
deceiving both himself and his audience.
Likewise, to maintain that the doctrines of Scripture are held to be
infallible yet that it is no consequence whether history or geography
of Scripture to be regarded as inerrant, fails to see the fact of the
matter -that he has only succeeded in pulling the rug out from
underneath his own feet.
This is an either/or thing. One must submit to plenary inspiration of
all of Scripture or you must launch yourself out in your little diggy
in the uncontrolable ocean of relativity. There is no third option.