[quote=“Vlad_Igor, post:59, topic:985404”]
Why does God have to be omnibenevolent or omnipotent?
[/quote
Theologian Thomas Jay Oord just wrote a book tackling that very question.
The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence: Oord, Thomas Jay: 9781948609913: Amazon.com: Books
Fair enough. I hope you see that happen. It may have already happened.
I don’t think God is anything except not good at doing the real. But I hear lots of Christians who claim omnipotence. And lots of “proofs” of god that require it.
There is precious little that God does in the Bible that can’t be accomplished by an advanced enough space alien.
I was trying to guess which version of God you believe in. You must admit that many Christians believe lots of contradictory things.
Now a question I’ve had for a while. It sounds like you don’t think the Bible is inerrant. (Correct me if I’m wrong.) So, how do you decide which parts are metaphor and which are real? If you don’t think everything that the writers claimed god said is moral (I’m betting you are not into slavery) do you use your ethical judgement to decide? History and science to reject the literal creation story?
In Hebrew school we learned the creation story, but no one tried to pass it off as history, which started with Abram. The Garden of Eden was a just-so story explaining death, work, childbirth and snakes. I had no trouble holding my acceptance of an old earth and dinosaurs with the Bible parts I thought were correct.
What does the story of Creation tell me about your god? That he is a character in a fable.
Thank you. I’ll add that to my list. I’m working my way through several inherited books by Bishop John Spong.
The way I see it, no story in the Bible is untrue. It is all true… until unavoidable facts come out, and that part magically becomes a metaphor. As a result the Bible contains a lot more metaphor today than It did a hundred years ago
Spot on. Thank you for putting this into words.
Theologically, that Creation and everything in it is inherently good, and to set the precedence for Shabbat, or the day of rest. The second story of creation was a retelling of Gilgamesh, only from a monotheistic point of view. It was also the beginning of a longer work spread out in the first three books of the Torah by an author given the name “J” (or Jahwhist) about the origins of the people of Israel, cast in the distant past. Both are stories, myths, that lay a theological foundation for later development of laws and contemplations of God.
…and there’s a problem with that? Metaphors work much better than literal readings, because metaphors were what scripture was written in, with a few very specific exceptions.
Have you read anything by John A. T. Robinson? He preceded Spong by several years, but was also making some of the same points.
No, I haven’t. I was aware of Bp. Spong when he was rattling cages in the 90s, but this is the first time I’ve read him. He makes some good points, but some of what he writes is him settling accounts with his past, IMHO. I don’t have a problem with that, but as a Bishop, he carries (or as of now, carried) some authority, so I read his work carefully.
I’ve heard of Spong behaving inappropriately with women (second hand), but he made points I agree with.
And those very specific exceptions are?
When I grew up most of the Bible was “real”-Adam and Eve, Noah, Jonah, David. The word “parable” was used sparingly, but if you tried to say that anything that wasn’t directly labeled a parable might not have actually happened, there was hell to pay.
In the Gospels, written in Greek, where someone says something that is recounted in Aramaic. One that comes to mind off of the top of my head is when Mary addresses the risen Jesus in Aramaic, “Rabbouni!” It is a statement of faith to say that she said this to the risen Christ. It may be a statement of fact that she said this at some point about the risen Christ, and it was carried as an oral tradition until it was written down in John’s Gospel decades after Jesus died.
You are correct that I do not view scripture as inerrant. The question I seek to answer when I write sermons is not what is real (or true) and what is metaphorical, or what the authors felt was moral or immoral, but instead what does this scripture passage (typically from one of the Gospels) mean to us in 2023? What are the implications for us today in our historical and cultural context? If we claim to be faithful followers of Jesus, what would that faith and practice look like in our lives as we live them here and now? I don’t defend the authority of scripture. I instead dig into it to find what is still relevant to us.
To ancient people, metaphors and what you call “real” were the same thing. Poetry and prose were merely different forms, not held to different rules. It is only extremely recently that some people started believing there was a distinct divide between them.
The ludicrous attempts by Biblical literalists to force a vast body of literature composed over thousands of years through the exceedingly narrow gate of scientific data is a result of this modern assumption that provable measurable fact is the only legitimate way understand the world.
Well, from what I can tell, no one actually lives by this assumption, if it is even possible. We still understand the world in metaphor and by telling stories. All of us. Whether we are aware of it or not.
The major issue I have with Christianity is that babies die, good people have shit lives while horrible people prosper, etc. all because Adam & Eve ate an apple 6000 years ago. Why should we be punished for that?! Oh and that’s not the worst part. Why are some people worthy of miracles and others are not? Do they pray harder? Did they catch God in a giving mood that day?
The other issue I have, although it is more about people than the G-Unit himself, is that he causes bad things to happen to you for no reason OR that good things are always because of him. No! Something good happens to you? It’s a gift from God. Something horrible happens to you. It’s God testing you. BUT don’t you dare question it or lose your faith that he is all-loving.
2 Hezekiah 4:04?
How old are you? I’m a 1954 kid, and other than those backwoods fundies, nobody was claiming that any of those characters you list besides David were real. Not the Presbyterian church I was confirmed in, not the Episcopal school I attended for five years. (In the 1960s in both cases.)
Sure, there have always been fundamentalists (or ‘inerrantists’ I guess they’re called now) who believe that every word of the Bible is literally true, but claiming that used to be anything like a consensus POV among Christians is bullshit.
ETA: During our lifetimes, that is.