Controversy: 3 Things We Get Wrong About Noah’s Ark

This is the third installment of the Genesis Controversy items. After this, we will look at less controversial yet still deeply meaningful topics regarding the book of Genesis. If you’re like me, most of the time when I read the Old Testament, I don’t take the time to hammer out the finer details of the…

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Genesis Controversy: 3 Reasons Why the Flood May Not Be a Global Event

In part 2 of my Genesis Controversy series, we will be addressing the Flood Narrative. A surface reading of the Flood narrative has led many to the conclusion of a catastrophic global flood that topped the highest mountain in the world by about 25 feet (15 cubits). For centuries, many have held this to be…

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2 More Images in Genesis With Connections To Other Origin Stories Pt. 2

In my last post we looked at some significant images in Genesis and compared their connections to other origin stories in the ancient world. We looked at the Watery Deep, the Serpent, and the Tree of Life. We saw how that in the mind of ancient Israelites, these images were loaded with significance, meaning, and…

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3 Images in Genesis With Connections To Other Origin Stories Pt. 1

When I started reading the Bible regularly as a teenager, I came across different stories that I had heard in references and conversations. Even in today’s world, with an increasing amount of “Nones” (people who have no 1st hand Christian/church background or exposure, some of the concepts and images from the Bible are still recognizable….

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How Sumerian Culture Influenced Genesis’ Author(s)

When I first started learning about Bible history, like many, I limited my scope of understanding to what was found in the Bible. Since then, I have learn much about the influence and influx of cultures into societies in general. Then, when I started digging deeper into some of the history mentioned in the Bible,…

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How The 7-Day Creation Narrative Has Deeper Meanings Than You Thought

In much of the Evangelical corner of Christianity, one of the litmus tests for whether someone is conservative enough (a.k.a. Faithful to the inerrancy of Scripture), is their belief in the days of creation. If someone holds to a literal 7-day creation cosmogony (see this post for elaboration), then they are considered faithful to the…

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How “Worldview” Must Influence Reading Genesis

In my last post, I wrote about the three terms we needed to define if we wanted to accurately interpret Genesis. You can read it here. In this post, I’m going to talk about one of those terms more comprehensively–worldview. I am going to focus on three characteristics of the worldview that surrounded the penning…

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3 Definitions Necessary to Really Understand Genesis: Worldview, Cosmogony, Mythos

In the last fifty or so years, discoveries and advancements in archeology, linguistics, and literary studies have greatly enhanced the way we understand the ancient world. These disciplines have opened up new forms of information regarding the Ancient Near East, what most of us refer to as the “Middle East,” the Egyptian Kingdoms, and Greek…

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How Female Submission Is Wrongly Justified with Bad Theology

I performed my first wedding in my single and complementarian days. I remember to this day making the statement in the homily that mirrored the phrases used by complementarian literature about the roles of men and women. I distinctly spelled out the concept of “equal in value, different in role.” The reason it stuck with…

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What We Miss in Genesis With Surface Readings

As a Christian, I spent years reading the book of Genesis the same way everyone else did–at face value. It really wasn’t until the last ten years or so that I began to read it differently. Ten years ago, I had already went to college and seminary. I had already started pastoring a church. I…

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