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Originally Posted by Mountaingirl79  Wow, that is intriguing. Thanks for responding!
It's hard for me to wrap my brain around, my parents aren't religious and the only people in my family who are christian believe in the literal interpretation of the creation story. Do you also believe that the Jesus miracles and the resurection are parables or metaphoric? ( I am seriously just trying to understand.  )
I also don't believe that we are separated from God, at all. The divine is within each and every one of us. The only "right or wrong" are actions that cause harm to others. ( Thats just MHO. :-) ) |
No, I don't think the stories about Jesus are meant to be metaphorical, though there are people who do.
In the case of Genesis, there are some suggestive points in the text itself that give indications that the story is meant to be more than just history, or something other than just history. For example, the story is at one point told twice, from two different points of view, with different details. Both versions are very instructive and useful though.
OTOH, there is little question that the gospels and acts are meant to be historical narratives, though like in any narrative of a life written down, the writer must make decisions about what to include, where to begin, and so on. Some reasons for thinking this are the way the texts are constructed and presented (a philologist could explain why, but I'm not sure I could, though they feel very different when you read them), and also because we have other records written by those who had first hand knowledge of the apostles, and it's clear they intended what they wrote as history. Miracles are an interesting, and large, topic, but essentially I think that a miracle is something that may be unnatural for us, but it isn't for God.
Christians don't exactly think we are separate from God in the sense that we are not lodged in an intimate way in God's being - have you ever read the Epic of Gilgamesh? That's a good example of what we mean by being separate. Gilgamesh was an almost perfect specimen of humanity, strong, smart, passionate, daring. But, he was miserable, because he could imagine the life of the God's, perfect and unending, while he himself was finite and mortal. He did all he could to gain immortality, and failed. That is kind of what we mean - there is a gap between what we can know, or the possibilities we can imagine (the perfection of the divine) and the actual life we find ourselves living. How is it that we can imagine such a thing if it doesn't somehow belong to our nature? Mice, as Robert Burns tells us, do not worry about the future or eternity. Why can we?
From a moral standpoint, the gap is evident in another way - why is it that we can know what the right thing to do is, but find ourselves doing the opposite, even when we really WANT to do the right thing? Animals don't do this - they do what their instincts tell them, and in the case of competing instincts, they go with the stronger. But if we are by nature creatures who think about right and wrong, which seems to be the case, then that is a natural ability. Why doesn't it behave like other natural abilities, so that we always do what our nature tells us to?
Of course Christians also believe that gap has been filled, through God's action toward us - which is to say, it is proper that we should concieve of eternity, because we are meant to be eternal creatures. That is why hope is such an important virtue, because we are supposed to hope for what we can imagine, rather than despair, with Gilgamesh, about what we can see.
I know my views are different than others though so I'm really only speaking for myself here.
