Wrestling with Genesis and Revelation

The inability of Christians to grasp the meaning and message of both Genesis and Revelation create a great divide in America. Christians struggle with both the beginning and culmination of the Scriptures — the Alpha and the Omega as they might be called. Both Genesis and Revelation bring a lot of baggage with them to the American religious scene.

We have great division on end-times views stemming from misadventures into Revelation. Our confused teaching has scarred our culture and created a religious society that has wasted immense energy preparing for the end of the world. The predictions have come and gone these past decades.

A few Christians are now ready, finally — at last, to leave behind the “Left Behind” mentality. Why? There have been too many false predictions. For some of us, they are hard to forget. Things got going with The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970. They heated up in 1987, and then we found it was really going to happen in 1988. Through the 90’s and even today we hear about the Middle East in prophecy. First, it was the Soviet Union. Then it was Saddam Hussein. Is it the European Union? Or is it Islam? The hot ticket for the Antichrist keeps changing hands. And who can forget Y2K? They have all come and gone and with them goes the credibility of tens of millions of Christians in America.

Genesis has been a more dangerous venture for some. Wrongly understood, it has the potential to undermine one’s faith in the God of creation.

Martin Timothy, Vaughn Jeffrey (2007) “Beyond Creation Science: New covenant creation from Genesis to Revelation” Apocalyptic Vision Press Whitehall MT

Seems a fair point. Those loudest about how Genesis must be understood have a long history of prophetic interpretative failures (from which nothing is learnt).

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Gen 3:21 God clothing Adam & Eve

“The stark reality is that beings who possess free will don’t always hew to the hopes and expectations of their creators. If this is so with us in respect to God, it is no less so with our children in respect to us…when our children disappoint us, when they make choices we don’t approve of; when they exchange the world we have carefully crafted for them for a dubious world of their own making – perhaps we too, after all the consequences have been meted out, after all the words have been said, after all the anguish has been absorbed – perhaps we, too, can provide them with clothes for the journey”

Fohrman, David (2021) “The Beast that crouches at the door” Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel and Beyond” (page 76) Jerusalem Israel, Maggid Books 

The Diffusion of Death: Romans 5:12 and Original Sin

“This interpretation leads to a reading of πάντες ἥμαρτον (“all sinned”) that is itself improbable. In the Augustinian interpretation, this refers to the whole human race sinning in Adam in a collective and participatory way. As Augustine himself puts it, “all have broken God’s covenant in that one man in whom all sinned.” The idea is that Paul speaks of an involuntary participation in Adam’s sin by an actual participation in Adam’s nature. Adam is not simply an individual, but the primal instantiation of human nature, and so the consequences of his fall not only affect him personally but also affect all his descendants subsequently and distributively.47 In our estimation, the theological underpinnings of this view are not in themselves objectionable; indeed, one can find precedent in Scripture for such a manner of thinking (see Heb 7:6–10). Nevertheless, the fact remains that, in his letters, Paul consistently uses the verb ἁμαρτάνω (“to sin”) for actual sins committed by morally responsible persons in the course of their individual lives. That he has this default meaning in mind in Romans 5:12d is nearly certain: earlier in the letter he uses the identical Greek expression to insist that “all have sinned [πάντες ἥμαρτον] and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23)—an unmistakable reference to the universal occurrence of actual sins—and two verses later, in a passage intended to preempt objections to 5:12, Paul speaks of multiple generations of “those whose sins [τοὺς … ἁμαρτήσαντας] were not like the transgression of Adam” (5:14). For these reasons, the translation “in whom” falters on linguistic grounds.”

Hahn, S. W., & Mitch, C. J. (2017). The Diffusion of Death: Romans 5:12 and Original Sin. Letter & Spirit, 12, 28.

Interesting

The very good creation included conflict/violence

People have a rose coloured view of what very good in Gen 1:30 means – thanks in no small part to Catholic father Augustine. But God’s words show the order of Genesis 1 included a forceful putting down of opposition and rule by humanity over the beasts. not only meat eating but conflict. Not what most literal creationists following a form of Augustine’s The Fall theology think.

Are the 7 days of Genesis 1 a list or a chronology?

I ran into an interesting article by Sterchi in JETS who argues based on the Hebrew grammar the 7 days are NOT in chronological but theological order. His argument (of which below is a very small snippet) is pretty interesting. It certainly makes more sense of the evening & morning being time markers for days 1-3 before the sun and moon are made on day 4. Not such a good read for literalists who dislike Bible scholarship.

The general point is sound

Why was Cain’s offering rejected?

Why was Cain’s sacrifice rejected in Genesis 4 and what are we meant to learn from this event?  We are not told what was missing from the offering.  There are no explicit revealed pre-existing criteria.  All we have is the comparison to Abel’s accepted offering.  Abel’s offering was his best, Cain’s perhaps not.  What the incident revealed was an underlying issue with Cain’s pride, which led to murder.

Before sin Adam was?

“La mortalité est sa condition, mais sa mort est cependant conditionnelle” Humbert [1]

Sometimes the French say it best?

[1] Van Ee, J. J. (2013). Death and the Garden : : An Examination of Original Immortality, Vegetarianism, and Animal Peace in the Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0qm3n0mt.

Augustine on over enthusiastic “purists”

there are some men who see in Scripture nothing else except those passages which admonish us to be strict, to rebuke the unruly, not to give what is holy to dogs, to regard as a heathen any man who does not heed the Church, to cut off from the body any member that gives scandal. Such persons only make trouble for the Church; they try to separate the cockle from the wheat before the appointed time. But because of their blindness they themselves rather are separated from union with Christ [1]

[1] Lombardo, G. J. with St. Augustine. (1988). St. Augustine on Faith and Works. (W. J. Burghardt & T. C. Lawler, Eds., G. J. Lombardo, Trans.) (Vol. 48, pp. 11–12). New York; Mahwah, NJ: The Newman Press.