2 Timothy 3:16-17 is the usual go-to verse. I do recognize that I am in a serious minority on the Ship.
But leaving aside inerrancy and related matters, and simply speaking to what you know of God's character: Do you really think he would allow someone to corrupt his message and THEN have the resulting mess enshrined for people's edification (or dis-edification) for all those years, and THEN come himself, incarnate, into the world, and say never a word about the problem? In a world full of people who did and do continue to hold that "Scripture cannot be broken," a view Jesus himself reinforced?
Because I don't. It would be criminally negligent of him to leave such corruption unremarked, if the solution to hard passages were so easy.
Look, I'm going to offer some advice you totally didn't ask for, and have every right to fling in my face. And it's this: Don't do apologetics until you have first spent a long, long time in personal study in all humility, trying to find out what is going on with the text using all aids--including the languages, the archaeology, what is known about ancient cultures from other writings, and so forth. Very often the answers to your apologetic tangles are to be found in those places. But you are not going to find a ready-made encyclopedia that lays all this out for you in easy-to-use bites. It takes an education, not a seminar, and that takes time. And open-mindedness. And a willingness to live with the pain of confusion and "I don't know" until such time as God sees fit to provide an answer (which may not come, in some cases, until the next world).
You sound a bit frantic now, as if you felt a need to come up with all the answers stat--either because you yourself are worried and trying to shore up your own faith, or because you are deeply concerned for someone else. If it's the first, take a deep breath and relax. The likelihood of someone coming up with a totally brand new, unheard-of, completely annihilating objection to the Christian faith after 2000 years of trying is ... It's not going to happen. Answers are out there. But you need to develop the capability to lay the hard bits aside on your plate, to chew on later maybe, without insisting that God make it clear to you NOW. This is part of what it means to walk in faith.
If it's someone else you're worried about, may I say that nobody I know of was ever argued into the kingdom of God? Apologetics exists mainly to clear the ground--that is, to remove unnecessary obstacles to faith, and to clear up points that might be causing some Christian unnecessary pain or worry. It is not the thing that plants faith itself. That is the Holy Spirit's work. And oddly enough, that seems to happen, humanly speaking, by contagion--by which I mean, they hang around you and other Christians, see how you live and how you love, and see Christ living within you. Apologetics is the least part of that, and in fact may drive many people away, if they feel they're being hammered on.
So basically chill, will you? Stop worrying, it'll be okay.
The decision to adapt was God's, not Moses's. Do you really think God would have let Moses do such a thing and get away with it?
Consider also the unlikelihood of Moses getting the adaptations in the right places and to the right degree. He was a man of his time, after all. No, that wisdom is God's.
HELP!
PLEASE!
Is there anywhere in scripture that describes this?
Firstly, I agree with @Lamb Chopped that humility in the face of such questions, and the text of Scripture, is a good thing. I also agree with her that it's important to relax. Nobody ever got saved on the basis of a 100% correct understanding of the Bible; it's not a test.
However, I'm not sure it's helpful to think in terms of God "taking a decision to adapt", as it were. I find it makes more sense to say that Scripture reflects the maximum amount of divine revelation that could be understood by God's people at any given time within their cultural and historical context (back to my "successive maps" illustration). We see more revelation emerge through Scripture, but - especially once beyond the prescriptive elements of the Law - this revelation comes about in a kind of collaboration between humans and God.
This collaboration seems clearest to me by the time we get around to the Council of Jerusalem (and one of the most important 'adaptations' of all in my view), with the Church leaders issuing instructions on the basis that "it seemed good to us and to the Holy Spirit" (Acts 15:28).
Even if God was ultimately behind that 'adaptation' and its outcome, the narrative presents it very much as emerging out of human initiative in the face of ongoing developments, and (perhaps surprisingly) the humans involved don't shrink from explicitly owning that responsibility alongside God in the person of the Holy Spirit.
One of the reasons I think trying to 'flatten' out all Scripture is misguided is because it treats evidence of such 'adaptations' as a bug, not a feature.
To put that last sentence another way, I think all the loose ends and apparent contradictions in Scripture, and indeed the disagreements about its bounds (in terms of the canon) make the case for its divine inspiration stronger, not weaker. Their existence reminds us that the text alone is not enough to know God.
The decision to adapt was God's, not Moses's. Do you really think God would have let Moses do such a thing and get away with it?
Consider also the unlikelihood of Moses getting the adaptations in the right places and to the right degree. He was a man of his time, after all. No, that wisdom is God's.
HELP!
PLEASE!
Is there anywhere in scripture that describes this?
No. You know there isn't. God does not operate this way, if He operates at all. It's all about what we bring to the party @Highfive.
The best I can do, what I bring to the party, is that God draws us as a magnet does iron filings, at most. And that is secondary to the idea of Incarnation. However once that idea is posited, it is possible to at least raise the question of did God align a culture, within others, in which to incarnate? If He did, He didn't do it in any of the claims of supernatural origin and intervention in the Old Testament. The Exodus is pure fiction. Moses a complete myth. He may have aligned the remarkable wisdom of the C6th-4th BCE editors of stories set a thousand years before, in ineffable ways typical of the ways attributed to the Holy Spirit, the ultimate wild card in explanation: 'by the Spirit'. Or may be we're just that smart as story tellers. Always have been. A thousand years back from now Europe, China, the Arab world etc were vastly more advanced than the Persian which was similarly so than the Egyptian. Time is not on your side and it heals all things.
Your primitive beliefs are being deconstructed. Smarter ones can be reconstructed. Steady.
Eutychus, I think your revelation-over-time/geographer analogy is the best way to explain it. Take it any further and you're justifying slavery for the Israelites. I'm leaving it at that.
And there's a lot more out there. I do find reading Jewish discussions interesting.
So do I. Looking at your first link from 'My Jewish Learning,' I note two points. The first is the obvious one that Jews read the Torah through a Rabbinical lens--always. This is generally illustrated by the story about Moses standing at the back of the study room and trying to interrupt to make a correction, and getting shushed (or, in some versions, thrown out). As is only proper. The second point, is, wonderfully, Nachmanides' reading of Deuteronomy 6:18, “And you shall do that which is right and good in the eyes of God.” Nachmanides reads this seemingly extra commandment as an injunction not to become a naval birshut ha-Torah — a degenerate with the permission of the Torah. That is, in addition to the specific commandments enumerated in the Torah, there is also a blanket rule — don’t think there are loopholes that you can exploit to be cruel. In other words, as we say here 'Don't be a jerk.'
Comments
But leaving aside inerrancy and related matters, and simply speaking to what you know of God's character: Do you really think he would allow someone to corrupt his message and THEN have the resulting mess enshrined for people's edification (or dis-edification) for all those years, and THEN come himself, incarnate, into the world, and say never a word about the problem? In a world full of people who did and do continue to hold that "Scripture cannot be broken," a view Jesus himself reinforced?
Because I don't. It would be criminally negligent of him to leave such corruption unremarked, if the solution to hard passages were so easy.
You sound a bit frantic now, as if you felt a need to come up with all the answers stat--either because you yourself are worried and trying to shore up your own faith, or because you are deeply concerned for someone else. If it's the first, take a deep breath and relax. The likelihood of someone coming up with a totally brand new, unheard-of, completely annihilating objection to the Christian faith after 2000 years of trying is ...
If it's someone else you're worried about, may I say that nobody I know of was ever argued into the kingdom of God? Apologetics exists mainly to clear the ground--that is, to remove unnecessary obstacles to faith, and to clear up points that might be causing some Christian unnecessary pain or worry. It is not the thing that plants faith itself. That is the Holy Spirit's work. And oddly enough, that seems to happen, humanly speaking, by contagion--by which I mean, they hang around you and other Christians, see how you live and how you love, and see Christ living within you. Apologetics is the least part of that, and in fact may drive many people away, if they feel they're being hammered on.
So basically chill, will you? Stop worrying, it'll be okay.
Thus endeth the lecture of the obnoxious LC.
Mind you, I still don't know what that parable means. I don't think anyone does.
I shouldn't talk about it here, but I speak to pastors I know here all the time about it.
Firstly, I agree with @Lamb Chopped that humility in the face of such questions, and the text of Scripture, is a good thing. I also agree with her that it's important to relax. Nobody ever got saved on the basis of a 100% correct understanding of the Bible; it's not a test.
However, I'm not sure it's helpful to think in terms of God "taking a decision to adapt", as it were. I find it makes more sense to say that Scripture reflects the maximum amount of divine revelation that could be understood by God's people at any given time within their cultural and historical context (back to my "successive maps" illustration). We see more revelation emerge through Scripture, but - especially once beyond the prescriptive elements of the Law - this revelation comes about in a kind of collaboration between humans and God.
This collaboration seems clearest to me by the time we get around to the Council of Jerusalem (and one of the most important 'adaptations' of all in my view), with the Church leaders issuing instructions on the basis that "it seemed good to us and to the Holy Spirit" (Acts 15:28).
Even if God was ultimately behind that 'adaptation' and its outcome, the narrative presents it very much as emerging out of human initiative in the face of ongoing developments, and (perhaps surprisingly) the humans involved don't shrink from explicitly owning that responsibility alongside God in the person of the Holy Spirit.
One of the reasons I think trying to 'flatten' out all Scripture is misguided is because it treats evidence of such 'adaptations' as a bug, not a feature.
No. You know there isn't. God does not operate this way, if He operates at all. It's all about what we bring to the party @Highfive.
The best I can do, what I bring to the party, is that God draws us as a magnet does iron filings, at most. And that is secondary to the idea of Incarnation. However once that idea is posited, it is possible to at least raise the question of did God align a culture, within others, in which to incarnate? If He did, He didn't do it in any of the claims of supernatural origin and intervention in the Old Testament. The Exodus is pure fiction. Moses a complete myth. He may have aligned the remarkable wisdom of the C6th-4th BCE editors of stories set a thousand years before, in ineffable ways typical of the ways attributed to the Holy Spirit, the ultimate wild card in explanation: 'by the Spirit'. Or may be we're just that smart as story tellers. Always have been. A thousand years back from now Europe, China, the Arab world etc were vastly more advanced than the Persian which was similarly so than the Egyptian. Time is not on your side and it heals all things.
Your primitive beliefs are being deconstructed. Smarter ones can be reconstructed. Steady.
So do I. Looking at your first link from 'My Jewish Learning,' I note two points. The first is the obvious one that Jews read the Torah through a Rabbinical lens--always. This is generally illustrated by the story about Moses standing at the back of the study room and trying to interrupt to make a correction, and getting shushed (or, in some versions, thrown out). As is only proper. The second point, is, wonderfully, Nachmanides' reading of Deuteronomy 6:18, “And you shall do that which is right and good in the eyes of God.” Nachmanides reads this seemingly extra commandment as an injunction not to become a naval birshut ha-Torah — a degenerate with the permission of the Torah. That is, in addition to the specific commandments enumerated in the Torah, there is also a blanket rule — don’t think there are loopholes that you can exploit to be cruel. In other words, as we say here 'Don't be a jerk.'