Summations Only

I guess I always need to say *European* settlers to satisfy the nitpickers here.Many Indian tribes and individuals did become Christian.

Sorry, I guess I have to literally spell everything out. We are saved from death by RESURRECTION, DA, not from actually having to die. We don't stay dead, we don't even stay in spirit form, we are resurrected with our BODIES, that's a PHYSICAL resurrection, which was impossible before Jesus died and rose again. When you say that "even" Jesus died you seem not to grasp that because Jesus was sinless He didn't have to die at all, because death is the result of sin. (But of course someone who believes in evolution wouldn't grasp this since death is just a part of life for you) But Jesus died FOR us, in our place, so that HIS resurrection could be OUR resurrection. BODILY resurrection.This IS based on the Bible but like a good liberal revisionist you change the meaning of the words that have been understood by orthodox theologians down the centuries in the sense I am using them. You really should read Machen who focuses on this liberal corruption of the Bible. Liberals don't seem to know how to read in context. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

A good follower of revisionist history. No, there were genuine Christian converts among the Indians, converted by love and persuasion and not by sword.

I was merely trying to correct a typical revisionist history, not to "vindicate Christianity."

If you aren't saved I'm not sure what sort of body you might expect, but those who are saved get glorified perfected bodies.

Again, I'm taking it from what you've written, but if I'm wrong I'm happy to be wrong. But since you believe in evolution it seems you must deny what the Bible says about how death entered with sin -- ABE meaning not only spiritual but physical death /ABE --, and if you deny that, instead thinking that death is just a part of life and not something that entered that corrupted the life God gave, I'd think it would make Jesus' death for us hard to explain. But the question is whether death was ALWAYS a "part of life" according to your theology or a corruption of life that entered because of sin, as my theology says. You appear to think that Adam would have died anyway and not on account of sin, the Fall, so that the only death he died was a "spiritual" death. Do I have that wrong? So that although you can go on to describe our resurrected bodies I have to wonder where that fits into your theology since it seems to be all about spiritual life and death and not bodily life and death to you. As long as "spiritual" doesn't mean something ethereal to you, something that can't eat fish for instance, as Jesus demonstrated He could in His glorified body, but really IS a body, though changed and glorified, we are in agreement on this point.But again, your language in general about spiritual death as opposed to bodily death suggests you don't believe Jesus died for our bodies and that "spiritual body" suggests something nonphysical.We are even said in scripture to be WAITING FOR the redemption of our BODY, not just our spirit. [abe: which confirms the interpretation that the body died at the Fall, or why would it need to be redeemed? /abe] In fact according to my theology our spirits are already regenerated through being born again in Christ. Our body is vile now because corrupted by the sin nature, so it needs to be raised an uncorrupted body.The reason to read Machen is that he demonstrates how liberals change the meaning of the Biblical text. You can quote the part about the spiritual body correctly for instance, but in the context of other things you've said about how it's all about spiritual death rather than bodily death, it seems likely you mean something different by all these things than traditional theology taught for all the centuries up to the development of modernism or liberalism. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Funny, I've treated no one as a "piece of dirt" but you have. What's your excuse?

It's Devils Advocate who thinks Adam only died spiritually [ABE: AS A RESULT OF THE FALL/ABE], not I. I think Adam died both spiritually and physically [abe: AS A RESULT OF THE FALL /ABE]. He did die physically, right? He isn't still living, right? Why assume that God meant he would physically die immediately? But that is also true if you think in terms of the corruption of the body, disease etc., as a process of death, because that would have started in his body immediately. If you believe that God does not lie then you try to understand what He meant. Seems obvious that He meant the whole being became subject to death, and that has to include every kind of corruption of the soul and body. It DID occur immediately, it also had prolonged consequences and in the end complete physical death. I've always understood this to be because he would have lived forever in a condition of sin and corruption, or paradoxically you could say, in a condition of death. Which is how Satan and his demons "live forever." Perpetually and increasingly full of hatred and pain and fear and disease, malevolent to "perfection" but never dying. This is not life as God wants us to have it. Jesus had to die to remove sin from us so that we could have eternal life free from sin and all the evils we are subject to from sin. I don't know but Jesus also demonstrated that even in His glorified body He ate. Eating may have a different meaning or function to an immortal being. I look forward to finally understanding such things. Yes, plants don't count. Not the same kind of life, not the same kind of breathing, not the same kind of death. Best I can do. I'm not God. I'm sure we'll all understand these things some day. Maybe I should have said it makes His death too easy to explain; it makes it trivial. It loses its importance and its meaning in connection with the Fall from which His death is to redeem us. It becomes a mere token rather than the world-shattering re-creation of life in the abolition of sin and death that we understand it to be. "The wages of sin is death" is meaningless in the context of death as a natural part of the physical world, but as an explanation of the reality we actually live it becomes the reason the sinless man-God who could not die in Himself took on death in our place for our sake. I'd say you're missing a lot.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : To add "AS A RESULT OF THE FALL in two places due to bizarre accusation that I'm lying rather than that I simply didn't feel it necessary to say the whole thing over and over again.

You don't need to accuse me of lying, I simply have some trouble grasping your point of view. You've been arguing with me that sin and redemption are all about spiritual death, not physical death, so please try again to make your meaning clearer to me.

No lie, I merely didn't get the whole phrase said.In Message 315 you said: Surely at least from the context of this discussion, as well as the fact that it would be absurd to suggest otherwise, you should know I didn't mean you denied that Adam physically died but that he died physically BECAUSE OF THE FALL [and I just added those words to my Message 377 where you apparently took me as lying], and that physical death for all of us is the result of the Fall.As I've understood your argument, you've been insisting that it's only spiritual death that was the result of the Fall, and the implication of that is that physical death is natural, which would also support your belief in evolution.Now you seem to be saying that it's only animals and plants you are talking about, as if you hadn't been denying that human death is the result of the Fall, as in Message 381 I see you are saying That's your *main* point? No, at least the point I've been arguing with is your saying that ADAM's physical death was not the result of the Fall. Are you saying something different than that or not?As for the death of animals being a result of the Fall I think it is inferred from the statement in Genesis that God put the whole Creation under the curse for the sake of humanity; also Paul's statement that "through one man death entered into the world" which is taken to mean Creation as a whole; also the statement that "all Creation groans for the revealing of the Sons of God" suggesting that the whole Creation, which certainly includes the animals, suffers on account of human sin too, and eagerly awaits the final redemption just as we do.Plants, again, do not seem to be treated in scripture as living in the sense that animals and human beings are.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : to add URLEdited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Only because of the Fall, but it was not a part of the original Creation. You are adding the "spiritual" to limit it to "spiritual death" but the normal reading is physical death. It includes spiritual death just as eternal life also includes the resurrected body. OK, here he is talking about eternal life versus death as a result of living according to the flesh. This is also a very odd reading in my experience. This is about our own obligation to mortify the sins of the body, though through the Spirit of course. In context it is WE who are putting to death our deeds through the Spirit, not Christ. But you are making an unnecessary distinction between physical life and spiritual life. It refers to both. Life is obedience to God, mortification of sin fosters that life; that life is both spiritual and physical. We will be CHANGED, scripture says, not that we will "lose" our bodies but that they will be glorified and perfected.But as you go on I see that we are in agreement about all the scripture you quote about how our resurrected bodies will be different than our physical bodies now.The only point is that they WILL be bodies, we will not be disembodied spirits, like angels or demons and ghosts. Jesus made a point of emphasizing that.So we agree on that much. What we disagree about is that Christ's death redeemed our physical bodies from death which came upon us because of sin at the Fall, just as He redeems our spirit, which I believe is done or at least begun when we are born again and receive the Holy Spirit. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

No idea. But the entire universe would have been different so perhaps all the planets were habitable. Who knows, I don't.

We don't need to assume there was no Fall to assume such high numbers you know. They lived even after the Fall to be hundreds of years old so they *could* have had many more than you are accounting for, but what scant evidence there is suggests nobody was procreating at the rate you have in mind, although I agree it certainly seems possible. In Genesis 5, the list of patriarchs, the first son is said to have been conceived when the father is around a hundred years old or older and then other sons and daughters are mentioned but not specified. If Genesis 10 gives the whole picture, Noah only had three sons although he lived to be 950. His descendants, listed by sons only, don't add up to huge numbers, maybe half a dozen to a father, sometimes only two. It's possible of course that many were not reported, only the major heirs in a line, and certainly daughters must have been born but weren't named. But specific names of the men are given, whose genealogies are followed down the centuries, which suggests that the numbers weren't anywhere near what you are guessing, for whatever reason, even for those generations that lived hundreds of years.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

We're fallen, they weren't. That was frako's context.

Of course I get that but it didn't happen when the people were living hundreds of years so why should it happen at all? In fact if you simply calculate all the children Adam and Eve could have had on a normal life span plus those of all their children and children's children the planet would be overrun very fast anyway. Same with Noah's sons, and their less long-lived descendants. Population CAN grow very fast with normal life spans but there is no reason to assume that it will. BUT IF IT DID AND THE FALL HAD NOT HAPPENED, there would have been all kinds of options we can't even guess at.