Bible, Theology & Philosophy

Read the series so far.

Biblical Christians ought to agree that God’s purpose in all His works is to bring glory to Himself. Whatever God has done in history, whether He has accomplished it directly or whether He has chosen to permit it through the agency of others, He has done in order that His perfections might be put on display, recognized, and acknowledged by His moral creatures. This point is not the dividing line between dispensationalism and its alternatives.

Biblical Christians should also agree that God is greatly glorified through the plan of redemption. That this plan was part of God’s purpose from eternity past is clear in Scripture. For example, the apostle Peter speaks of Christ as a lamb who was “foreknown before the foundation of the world” (1 Pet. 1:19-20). God always intended to glorify Himself by redeeming humans through the cross-work of Christ.

All saved individuals of all times and places hold a great deal in common. Their commonality is one consideration that undergirds passages like Hebrews 11. The life of faith is essentially the same life, at whatever period in the history of redemption. Indeed, if the life of faith is not essentially the same in both Testaments, and in every part of each Testament, then the argument of the entire book of Hebrews simply collapses.

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CHAPTER III. FALLACIES OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM.

Mythology is everywhere (see Part 1), and there are biblical reasons that Christians should not necessarily break out in hives when they encounter mythology (see Part 2). The good news is that there can be much more to the Christianity-mythology relationship than narrow-eyed tolerance. There are numerous practical benefits to having a good understanding of mythology.

1. Meeting historical/cultural expectations

Knowing where we came from is just part of being an educated person. As one pastor has pointed out, we expect grade school students in Maryland to learn Maryland history—so as heirs of Hellenic and Latin civilizations, we owe it to ourselves to be somewhat knowledgeable about Greco-Roman culture.¹ It’s simply our history.

We also have a Judeo-Christian history, but let us learn both instead of gravitating towards one over the other. Neither let us pretend that Christian history is pristine compared to the stories of polluted pagan mythology. Biblical history is nothing more than stories of God’s salvation of pagans.

One could argue that we are to be counter-cultural, and that is true in a certain sense. But being counter-cultural does not mean that we have to counter everything.² At times, Paul argues from both creational and cultural norms.³ Creational norms are fixed, but there are also acceptable cultural reasons for acclimating ourselves to our surroundings. We may not like some aspects of our culture, but we should be educated in the culture that we find ourselves in.

Read the series so far.

In the Bible, a people or nation is an ethnic unit that derives its solidarity largely from common descent. Of course, at one time the entire human race constituted a single people (Gen. 11:6). All humans descended in the first place from Adam, and secondarily from Noah. Before the tower of Babel, no ethnic or national differences existed. According to the Bible, these differences arose after God scattered the human race by confounding their languages. In other words, the division of nations is a result of God’s judgment upon human sin, though at the end of human history God is going to bring great glory out of this division—but more on that later.

As the table of nations in Genesis 10 makes clear, the human race was divided into an array of different peoples. As distinct nations, they were characterized by the different families from which they emerged, the different languages that they spoke, and the different territories that they occupied (Gen. 10:5). Additionally, either before or during the division of nations, humanity was becoming more and more corrupt. The apostle Paul describes this process in Romans 1:19-32. It is not clear exactly when the process reached its nadir. Yet Paul speaks of all three stages in God’s “handing over” (the term is paradidomi, which implies a handing over to judgment) in the aorist indicative, suggesting that, from his point of view, these judgments were already in force. Most likely the judicial “handing over” occurred during the early years of human history, and if the three stages were not complete before the scattering of the human race, they were certainly complete by the time it finished.