[Vision2020] Religion and Morality

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Hi Chris:

I don't think this debate is going anywhere, but the Hebrew Scripture section of the regional Society of Biblical Literature (www.pnw-aarsbl.org/) would be very happy to receive a paper for our May, 2008 conference at conservative evangelical George Fox University.  (Again I will invite NSA students and faculty.) They will be kind to you, but I can guarantee you that your views on the origins and composition of Hebrew scripture will found to be rather eccentric. 

Our current Hebrew text comes from the 9th Century CE, over two thousand years after the time of Moses. How do we really know what the ancient Israelites were doing and saying to one another?  The only way to do that is to go beyond a literal reading of the text to a thorough linguistic, historical, and socio-economic analysis. By the way, Bible scholarship, defined as the investigation of the Bible using archeology, linguistics, philology, history, and the social sciences is only 200 years old, not millennia.  Bible believers are selective, but Bible scholars look at the texts in their Sitz im Leben.

You have mentioned the "image of God" many times, but now we finally have the ancient meaning of this term, and it explains a lot of things.  For example, why is it that only Jesus has it in the New Testament?  It is because it's ancient meaning had nothing to do with having a moral and rational essence (far too Greek!); rather, it means that Adam or Christ are God's representative on earth.  

Here are some references: A. R. Millard and P. Bordreuil, "A Statue from Syria with Assyrian and Aramaic Inscriptions," Biblical Archeologist  Summer 1982:  135-41; and E. M. Curtis, "Images in Mesopotamia and the Bible:  A Comparative Study," in W. W. Hallo, et al., The Bible in the Light of Cuneiform Literature.  Scripture in Context III (pp. 31-56) Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Studies.  Lewiston:  Edwin Mellen, 1990.  With these discoveries, an entire tradition on the imago dei bites the dust!  Do you want to put faith in a text that is so vulnerable to discoveries such as these, including the possibility of Jesus' bone box, along with Mary Magdelene's and (horror of horrors!) a child?

Yes, an omnipotent God could resurrection Isaac on the spot, but that is not the same as the general resurrection of the dead that we don't see until Ezekiel.  I guess you simply want to ignore all the passages about Sheol, the place where everyone goes with no hope of resurrection.

Abraham may be sure that he is coming back, but how do you know that included Isaac?  The passage you quote is totally ambiguous on this point.  Of course you know that the devout Danish Christian Soren Kierkegaard, author of "Fear and Trembling," the greatest book ever written on Gen. 22, would roll over in his grave in Copenhagen (I visited it many times) at your nampy-pampy version of the most terrifying challenge a father would ever face.  One would think that a crawling-over-cut-glass Calvinist would embrace the full horror of this incredible story.  For centuries skeptics have also seen this as yet another example of Yahweh the Moral Monster.

With regard to the entire Bible's inerrancy, need I remind you that when Paul, if he is the author of 2 Tim. 3:15-17, says that he read God-breathed scripture from childhood, so he could not possibly of meant the New Testament, and certainly not his own letters, most of which have been lost.  (Scholars have detected parts of four in 1 and 2 Corithians.) He would have thought it the height of blasphemy that these letters, contingent as they were in as much as he could have visited these places, would become the inerrant Word of God.


Five vague references to a Triune God that were not picked up on for 300 years are not the basis for a well grounded theological doctrine.  Read my essay at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/trinity.htm and respond to it.  If you had read it, you would have learned that Gen. 1:26 is a grammatical plural of majesty and elohim elsewhere is proof positive of an ancient Hebrew polytheism.  Read my essay instead of just spouting off.  Reeling off unrelated Bible verses without any scholarly checks and balances is a bad form of theological diarrhea.

Regard to the Netherlands and Japan, it looks as if the divine judgment, as the later Jerry Falwell indicated, is falling on corrupt and immoral America not prosperous and virtuous Japanese and Europeans.

Now, for that paper for my Japan trip.  No more distractions, at least for now.

Thanks for the dialogue,

Nick Gier