An ongoing weekly series of quotes from Martin Luther.
The earth is 6,000 years old … because Moses said it is.
We know, on the authority of Moses, that longer than six thousand years the world did not exist.
– Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis
Tags: Creationist, Genesis, Martin Luther, Moses, Quote, Young Earth
July 12, 2009 at 11:44 am |
You know, some days–and this is one of them–I can’t help but admire the simple-minded (I mean that in the kindest of ways) who buy into that stuff hook, line, and sinker.
July 12, 2009 at 12:14 pm |
I am glad you posted this, since I was afraid there was no proof of a young earth. How can anyone refute what such a great leader like Martin Luther says? We need emots so you can better tell I am laughing my ass off.
July 12, 2009 at 3:40 pm |
That was kinda a low blow to…*Cough* Cameron *Cough*…
But it just made my day!
ROFL!!!
July 12, 2009 at 2:25 pm |
In a related vein, Luther’s protege Melanchthon inveighed against Copernicus.
Love it when theologians (i.e., experts in fantasy) try to weigh in on matters of science (i.e., reality).
July 13, 2009 at 7:51 am |
OK, so now we know Luther’s opinion on the age of the Earth. How did he feel about uranium mining?
July 13, 2009 at 8:30 am |
He was for it. They didn’t have environmental laws in the Garden of Eden.
July 13, 2009 at 9:20 am |
Great quote. Thank you and God bless.
July 13, 2009 at 9:34 am |
Your welcome, and Flying Spaghetti Monster bless.
July 13, 2009 at 12:57 pm |
Newton once attempted his own calculation of the age of the earth and came within a few years of the accepted (at the time) age of some 6000 years.
Newton would probably change his opinion if all the facts available now were put in front of him.
I think Luther would as well – Lutheran’s today do not have a problem with the age of the earth as determined by science – or with evolution for that matter.
Newton was one of the best scientists in history – and lived 150 years after Luther – so why hold a 16th century theologian up to the scientific standards of today?
July 13, 2009 at 1:06 pm |
This is the big problem with Christianity today. You believe every word of the Bible to be truth until it is proven to be bunk. Then it magically becomes an allegory or metaphorical teaching. Unless you are a brainwashed fundamental Christian. Then you believe every impossible word of the Bible to be factual.
How can a person continue to believe the words written by primitive men riding around on camels are the “inspired words of God”? When over and over it is proven to be little more than flawed man-made theology and folklore?
July 13, 2009 at 1:48 pm |
Pretty good summary.
But I think you overstate it slightly: Even early Christians did not take the creation story to be factual – it is so obviously a form of Hebrew literature – poetry – that is not intended to be factual.
The Psalms were never taken by their original audience as a collection of facts – again, it is poetry.
The early Christians did not take Revelation as factual – it is clearly allegorical.
The parables are not factual – there was probably not a good samaritan or prodigal son.
And so on. Forcing the Bible to be a rational document is a problem for the fundamentalists to explain, if they can.
The Bible – however it was written and compiled and whatever its factual content – brings us the word of God. That is all we expect from it.
The Bible gives us revealed truth. If you are not open to truth except by rational means, then the Bible will never make sense.
But you cannot disprove through reason the revealed truth in the Bible any more than the Bible can be rationally proven as infallibly factual.
July 13, 2009 at 3:39 pm
The Bible was not written to be factual. We can’t figure what portions are factual. It can’t be taken as rational. BUT… and here comes the big finish!…. “it gives us revealed truth”
WTF!!
July 13, 2009 at 10:36 pm
LeoPardus
Now you have it!
If you want to be a man strictly of the enlightenment, then rationalism is the only path to truth. Good luck with it.
Those of us with faith claim access to the revealed truth in the Bible. We accept that all truth is not bounded by the limits of science and logic.
July 14, 2009 at 9:23 am
Paul M:
My wife loves to pull this silly “you’re just using enlightenment thinking” on me too. I must admit it amazes me.
Here we have humanity learning to think in a way that, once it really took hold, has led us to more progress than all the past millennia of human history combined, and some theists, in a desperate attempt to hold on to their irrational belief in invisible beings, dismiss it.
It’s really sad.
Theists are praying for God to heal their diseases and God does nothing. Meanwhile “enlightenment thinking” people ARE healing your diseases.
Theists want God to provide food, clothing, etc. and He does nothing, meanwhile “enlightenment thinking” people are providing improved farming methods, better, cost effective ways of making buildings, and so on.
All your prayers end up answered by “enlightenment thinking” people, and you want to insist that your invisible friend is better.
Truly sad.
[Awaiting the reply, "Well God made those "enlightenment thinking" people able to do that stuff."]
July 14, 2009 at 11:22 pm
This revealed truth sounds very mysterious and quite a lot like the emperor’s new clothes: it can only be understood by people with some extra cognitive ability, which you call faith.
This might not be the proper place for this, but I wonder if you could give a simple demonstration of a revealed truth in the Bible, which might help someone understand in a practical way how this works. This would include:
— The original passage which provides the revealed truth
— A statement of the revealed truth in your own words: I am assuming here that the revealed truth is not simply the literal words of the Bible passage; or, if so, say so.
— How you know that this passage provides a revealed truth and is not simply one of the items of ordinary literature in the Bible
— How faith contributes to knowing that this passage provides a revealed truth: What specific idea or concept does faith add to the plain words of the passage which allows it to be recognized as revealing truth?
— How faith contributes to understanding the revealed truth that this passage provides: What specific idea or concept does faith add to the plain words of the passage which allows the revealed truth to be understood from it?
The premise here is that as you read the Bible passage, your brain is thinking additional thoughts which do not come from the words themselves, but are provided somehow by faith. I do not suppose that you necessarily know the source of these additional thoughts, but you must be aware of them if you are finding meanings that other people do not. If the thoughts that come from faith could be explicitly set down next to the plain words of the passage, perhaps other people could see your reasoning and understand what you mean by access to revealed truth.
I doubt that this would lead to anyone agreeing with you about revealed truth, but it might make the concept less mysterious.
July 14, 2009 at 7:46 am |
OK, I’ll bite. Name one part of the bible you believe to be “bunk”? And I am assume “bunk” is an intellectual way of saying wrong.
July 14, 2009 at 10:28 am
Where to start? The majority of the Old Testament is little more than folklore. Most of the New Testament is second hand testimony, heresy or texts written by anonymous authors 40-70 years after Jesus’ death.
I also have on ongoing series of biblical conflicts that have barely scratched the surface of the Bible’s flawed information.
Read more here, and many more to come:
http://en.wordpress.com/tag/bible-teaching-of-the-week/
July 14, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Sorry, I didn’t realize it was such a complicated question.
Name one part of the bible you believe to be “bunk”?
I do not know how to simplify it anymore than that.
July 14, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Leviticus chapter 11 is a wondrous font of biological bunk. Bats are a type of fowl, rabbits chew their cud, and insects have only four legs.
July 14, 2009 at 2:04 pm
I gave you 19 biblical examples if you would actually click a link. I didn’t realize that was such a complicated task. But I can simplify it for you by giving you a 20th example:
The story of Noah’s flood is bunk. Noah managed to not only build a boat big enough to hold all the creatures of the earth, but he also gathered them from every continent, fed them all for 40 days, and returned them each back to their respective continents after the flood.
The rain fell for 40 days covering every high hill on the earth. This means 10,000-20,000 feet of water rained down on the earth in 40 days. This would have required rain to fall at a rate of around 15 feet per hour. This would obviously overtake and sink any boat, let alone one loaded with thousands of animals. Also consider the mass of people that would have mobbed and fought to get onto Noah’s Ark when the flood started. And we are also to believe the all-powerful God needed this man to help carry out his divine plan.
Give me a break.
July 13, 2009 at 7:16 pm |
It’s just plain stupid how people STILL think that the world is only 6,000 years old.
July 15, 2009 at 11:33 am |
@ Verbifex:
Thanks for asking.
Here is the most concise example I can think of – Romans 3:21-26
” 21But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement,[i] through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— 26he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus. ”
The central truth here is that the death and sacrifice of Jesus restores our broken relationship with God. This is what Paul calls “righeousness.” We are all in sin and fall short of being able to be restored to God’s favor by our own efforts – we really deserve God’s punishment. But by God’s grace we are given redemption as a gift through the sacrifice of Jesus. This is free – all we have to do is believe.
This passage is revealed truth because it speaks explicitly about how Jesus has changed our relationship with God. The Old Testament speaks of a comming messiah, but in Romans Paul explains what the messiah has done. This is new information about God and his purposes – revealed to us by Paul’s words.
This truth is not available from provable facts. Many have stated that it is impossible to prove that Jesus ever existed, that God exists or that mankind is in a sinful condition. So the only way we know these things is by the truth as revealed to us in the Bible.
Paul says that these things require faith to believe. Faith is required for belief because there is no provable chain of facts and deductions that can lead to this truth. So we accept this by faith, not reason or logic.
Does this help?
July 17, 2009 at 10:53 pm |
The example gives me a clearer picture of what you mean by “revealed truth” and how it relates to faith. After thinking about it and how to compose a suitable reply, I find that I appreciate more than before that no one ever indoctrinated me with this way of thinking. You gave me an answer to my question and I should give you my response it.
It seems to me that the essence of this example is that you identify something that you choose to believe, i.e., that is a part of your faith, and call it revealed truth. You use that term to artificially distinguish the items identified this way from the rest of the Bible which you agree is just literature.
I think that faith did not contribute to your restatement of the text. You did not add any meaning which is not in the original. Clearly you have studied this and related material, and you clarified the archaic language of the original translation. But this is the result of scholarship, not faith. Faith is involved in believing this material, but does not contribute to grasping its meaning.
Faith did apparently provide the criterion by which you identified this passage as “revealed truth”: “because it speaks explicitly about how Jesus has changed our relationship with God.” But that is essentially just a tautology: you choose (on faith) to believe anything in the Bible about that topic so anything about that topic is revealed truth for you to believe.
The example confirms for me that when you say “revealed truth” you are not using the word “truth” in the normal way. As you cheerfully admit, “[revealed] truth is not available from provable facts”. Thus, it is more a “revealed tenet” that you choose to regard as true for yourself (and your coreligionists). It is only “true” in the sense that you accept it as a part of the belief system that you have adopted. Apparently this works for you.
I will add one thing. I have found it very hard to understand how faith shapes your thinking. In the same way, I think that operating on faith and “revealed truth” makes it very difficult for you to understand that I have no faith. I do not have an explicit faith that there is no god. I simply have no faith at all, period.
July 18, 2009 at 11:07 pm |
Thank you for your thoughtful response. Even if you cannot accept truth when it comes to us as revealed, I think you are beginning to at least understand what it is and how it differs from truth arrived at rationally.
As I have stated before, most of the misunderstandings between rationalists and Christians occur when fundamentalists conflate revealed truth with factual or provable truth. In my opinion it simply can’t be done – there is no reason even to try because we operate by faith.
Keep in mind also that the Bible was not finalized until about 400 AD. In the very early years of Christianity the revealed truth was called the Word and was transmitted orally and so the examination of texts and phrases was not a part of theology. This may explain why you see a sort of circular reasoning going on – we belive the Word and we look for it in the revealed truth contained in the Bible – and it never fails to be there.
September 5, 2009 at 12:36 pm |
Many things in the Bible contradict. I see Jesus and his works to be against their teachings. i.e. healing on the Sabbath. Religions get corrupted, who do you think Jesus got mad at in the temple? Control money, power, bloody sacrifice I do not stand for.
The works of Jesus the forgiveness and service to others I see as good. I am not a Zionist, I am a Christian and only by his teachings alongside intelligent creation I rejoice. If there is only one God or intelligence then every good or evil, spiritual energy and physical mass must be of him/her whatever.
Man did the Priests and the people in power hate him! They killed him because he was breaking down there system. If you cant see that in reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John your blind. Jesus was one
with the creator he understood that why can’t we. Love is service to
others, we must love and forgive. He was speaking mainly to the
Jews he was born into but also the Gentiles.
In the Zondervan NIV Study Bible in the first pages it list ancient texts relating to the old testament. This includes the Gilgamesh Epic Ge6-9 from Akkadian early 2nd millennium b.c. or Enuma Elish Ge1-2 also Akkadian… do your digging have fun follow your heart!
September 5, 2009 at 11:42 pm |
They killed him because he claimed to be God, which was blasphemy. If you can’t see that, you need to study history and your Bible. It was punishable by death to blasphemy God, and claiming to be God would be the ultimate offense. Jesus didn’t break their system, he broke their law and was executed for it.
I’ve done plenty of digging. My brain doesn’t allow me to believe obvious contradictions and flawed testimony. You can rejoice in biblical teaching if it gives you joy. I see it as a huge waste of time believing in ancient fairy tales.