There’s that one question that has plagued Christians on anthropological origins. Many young earth creationists claim there cannot be any gaps in the genealogy, which is what leads us to dating the time frame of the earth being young. Old earth creationists, like myself, believe that there are gaps in the genealogy. The question is whether it explains anything at all and how much does it explain?
The genealogies are adequate but not complete. No matter how you read the genealogies, you must concede that there are gaps. For example Mt. 1.8:
Asa the father of Jehoshaphat, Jehoshaphat the father of Jehoram, Jehoram the father of Uzziah.
However, 1 Chron. 3.10-12 reads it differently:
Asa his son, Jehoshaphat his son, Jehoram his son, Ahaziah his son, Joash his son, Amaziah his son, Azariah [also called Uzziah] his son.
Why did Matthew leave out three generations: Ahaziah, Joash, and Amaziah? Scholars cite some reasons for the seeming discrepancy. In many biblical lists of descendants, cadence and pattern hold great importance. Matthew presented three groups of fourteen generations each: fourteen from Abraham to David; another fourteen from David to the Babylonian exile; and a third set of fourteen from the Babylonian exile to Jesus.
I have come to conclusions that I am certain that you do not accept about the existence of God. My conclusions are theological and philosophical based and I can offer full discourse in defense. What I would like to know is how far away are we from each other once we realize that what we believe about the one true living God is different.
Do you believe that God has free will?
Can The Lord go back in time and change Judas for John?
I accept the partially-openview as a characteristic of existence for both God and man.
How would you interpret 1 Samuel 13:13?
The other is that I believe that those that are fearful of creation science need to consider their motivation and assure that they are not being deceived by methodological naturalism and unnecessarily extended ages of the earth and the universe.
I am a fan of ID but what I deplore is that there is an anti-creation bias associated with most proponents of ID. I understand the neutral conclusion of ID, but there is no reason to avoid young earth creationism from dialogue.
1 Cor 15:47
Do you believe in a literal global catastrophic flood?
The teaching of Scripture seems to assert that post-Genesis 3 humans possess libertarian free will, including freedom to choose between opposites on matters pertaining to salvation or any other spiritual good. This immediately raises questions surrounding the concept of original sin. Augustine first used the expression “original sin” in the wake of the Pelagian controversy.[1] Upon arriving at Rome in A.D. 400, the British monk Pelagius was horrified to see the open immorality prevalent among so-called Christians.[2] This was the direct result of Theodosius I nineteen years earlier (381) declaring Christianity to be the state religion so decreeing that anyone living within its borders to be Christian. This was a transformation of Christianity from a voluntary religion (one that people freely choose to join) to a natural religion (one into which people are born) spawned immense immorality in many people who bore the name of Christ without ever having personally committed their lives to Jesus.[3] Pelagius exhorted the Romans to live worthy of their Christian calling with an argument logically summarized in two steps:
1. Humans possess libertarian free will.
2. Humans should use their libertarian freedom to be good enough people to earn their own salvation.[4]
Unfortunately, as so often happens in the history of thought, one extreme position meets the response of an equally extreme opposing position, thus swinging the ideological pendulum from one side to the other. Very rarely is prudence taken in shifting the pendulum back to the center, where the truth is most likely to be found.
V3—God has made available everything we need spiritually through Him
If 2 Peter was written to fight Gnosticism, then spiritual necessity is not esoteric
Believers are called to live in harmony with God’s moral character
“Excellence” (arête- virtue) used to sum up all desirable character qualities
V4—“Partakers” (koinonos- sharer) we never become part of God but this can found mostly in Peter’s sermon at Pentecost (Acts 2.14-41) through the Holy Spirit)
“Divine nature” a term Peter could use to relate to Hellenists about understanding the idea of conforming to the image of Christ
“Having escaped…” at conversion we are delivered from the corruption of the world
Eleonore Stump is The Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, where she has taught since 1992. In 2012, Dr. Stump was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among other honors, she is past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers, the American Catholic Philosophical Association, and the American Philosophical Association, Central Division. She delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in 2003, the Wilde Lectures at Oxford University in 2006, the Thomas Merton Lecture at Columbia University in 2008, and the Stewart Lectures at Princeton University in 2009. She is the author of numerous articles and books, includingWandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford 2010).
Last October (2012) Gary Habermas delivered a lecture to the Ratio Christi chapter at Liberty University on the historical data concerning the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The video was professionally captured and you may view the videos in the links below.
There are primarily six passages in the Bible that concern the issue of homosexuality. In Leviticus 18.22 it says that it is an abomination for a man to lie with another man as with a woman. In Lev. 20.13 the death penalty is prescribed in Israel for such an act, along with adultery, incest, and bestiality. In Gen. 19 Sodom is destroyed for their homosexuality and wickedness.
In I Cor. 6.9-10 Paul writes, “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the Kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the Kingdom of God.” The words in the list translated “men who practice homosexuality” refer in Greek literature to the passive and the active partners in male homosexual intercourse. In I Tim. 1.10 along with fornicators, slave traders, liars, and murderers as “contrary to the sound teaching of the Gospel.” In Rom. 1.24-28 Paul states,
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
I’m sure some of you are aware of this but you can view high resolution digital images of Codex Sinaiticus online.
Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript – the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity – is of supreme importance for the history of the book… continue reading.
The universe was created 13.73 billion years ago. At about 10-44 seconds after the big bang inflation kicked in and underwent a period of rapid inflation (expansion, this inflation force is thought to be dark energy depicted in Einstein’s lambda term (the cosmological constant) in the right hand side of his field equation describing the energy momentum of the universe.) The cosmological constant is a characteristic of the spacetime fabric of the universe related to its stretching energy (space energy density—commonly referred to as dark energy). The more the universe expends, the greater this stretching energy becomes.[1] When the spacetime fabric stretches, the bodies of masses, such as galaxies, move farther apart by the stretching of space. The cosmological constant is in effect a pulling property that works against gravity. Since creation, the cosmological constant’s effect has been increasing. Initial expectations were for the expansion to slow down and for the universe to collapse back in on itself. For instance, when a ball is tossed in the air its speed slows down and the ball falls to the ground.
