Wednesday, June 24, 2020

No biblical justification to think God lives "outside" of time

I posted this to another forum I participate in:

I don't understand why Christians put so much effort into distinguishing the eternity of heaven from the earth-based sense of temporal progression, as if there were the slightest biblically justified reason to distinguish the two as qualitatively different.

Each and every biblical description of heaven presents events taking place there as if they are just as bound to temporal chronological progression as earth-bound events are.  Servants present themselves to kings on earth, and the sons of God presented themselves before God (Job 1).

Soldiers stand before their king awaiting orders on earth, and god's demons stand before his throne awaiting orders to go make people tell lies.  1st Kings 22:19 ff

The modern Christian belief that heaven is another dimension, is not biblical.  Nothing in the bible remotely expresses or implies that heaven is some other dimension.  Flying in heaven requires wings, which indicates heaven has air (Isaiah 6:1-7).  Such a reference also logically implies gravity in heaven (i.e., the angel would fall down if he tried to fly without wings).

There's fire in heaven (Isaiah 6:6) so the second law of thermodynamics operates there too.  What was on fire was a "coal", which indicates there are sources of fuel in heaven, such as wood.  The reality of the fire logically necessitates that oxygen is in heaven too. 

That beings in heaven are limited to time-bound temporal progression is clear from the departed souls under God's altar, who complain that God is taking too long to mete out his vengeance. Revelation 6:10.

Then there's that verse that absolutel shows heaven to be bound to time, that verse that proves there's no women in heaven.  Rev. 8:1.

Christians are not saving face or winning the debate by conjuring up clever theories to reconcile biblical statements with modern physics.  The priority is not "how can we reconcile this biblical statement with obvious reality?"

The priority is "how did this biblical author intend the reader to understand this phrase?" 

A major rule of hermeneutics is to ask how the originally intended addressees would have understood the passage in question.

Christians have no hope of pretending that such pre-scientific people would have been suspicious that the above-cited passages were mere "accommodations" to the limited mental capacities of sinful man...or that heaven was a different "dimension".  It is perfectly reasonable to take such passages literally, and the only possible motive a Christian could have to insist they are mere cases of phenomenological language is a desire to promote biblical inerrancy, regardless of intellectual cost.

What Christians will never do, in ten lifetimes, is demonstrate that the above-cited skeptical interpretations of such bible verses is "unreasonable".  But if we can be reasonable to interpret those passages literally, the inerrantist is deprived of the intellectual right to insist we give him a hearing.

Perhaps the cherry on top is the Ascension of Jesus in Acts 1.  Skeptics say Jesus did this because he knew heaven was physically "up there".

Inerrantists will say "no, he knew heaven was just a different dimension not attainable by moving in any spatial direction, but he was merely accommodating himself to the false cosmological viewpoint held by his 1st century apostles".

Have fun demonstrating THAT using normative principles of hermeneutics, such as grammar, immediate context, and genre.

No comments:

Post a Comment

My reply to Bellator Christi's "Three Dangerous Forms of Modern Idolatry"

I received this in my email, but the page it was hosted on appears to have been removed  =====================  Bellator Christi Read on blo...