I hear ya. See also: movies that include an actor pretending to play an instrument but not even coming close to having their hands in the right places.

That's actually one of the reasons I love That Thing You Do so much - even though the actors didn't record the music, they're playing the right chords on their guitars and drumming accurately throughout the show. Makes the movie really work for me.

Thanks, John. That seems so obvious, and yet it's something that the evangelical churches that I've been in seem to have missed. Frankly, there's a bunch of fuzziness surrounding the Lord's Supper in our (lack of) tradition. It verges toward being just something we do from tradition rather than something we do because we really understand what's going on. Or maybe I've just been clueless for thirty years. (It's possible.)

I think you're pretty much on here, bro, though I'm still working through what I think about the idea of partaking 'in an unworthy manner'. In the context of the chapter, it seems to me more like Paul's "unworthy manner" is talking about those folks who show up early and pig out before everyone has arrived, not those who are potentially unrepentant sinners. As you've noted, we're pretty much all potentially unrepentant sinners at various points in our lives.

There's a blog post floating around in my brain that needs to be written on this topic... let's see if I can make it coalesce into something respectably coherent. :-)

Yeah, that's a typo, I would infer from the rest of his piece that he meant "repentant". Did you read the comment thread after the post? I said pretty much the same thing in the first comment.

I like your way of putting it - the first being done in anticipation. You know, feel free to jump in on the comment threads of those blogs, too. :-)

Yes, Texas is rather deficient in that regard.

(We'll see how Iowa turns out. At this point we have only an inch of snow and dire threats of more.)

Yeah, that's our place. It usually doesn't have the backhoe out in front, though. :-P

You took up the cause nicely over on JT's blog, Ryan. I was surprised by how quickly the debate turned to the political merits of healthcare reform and ran quickly away from the question "what would Jesus do?".

OK, so maybe I'm not too surprised. The latter is a lot harder question than the former. :-)

First off, just for fun, note that neither Mars Hill Church's doctrinal statement nor The Gospel Coalition's Confessional Statement include an assertion of the age of creation.

Second, I agree with Driscoll - the Bible is all about Jesus. But I think you're not drawing a fair conclusion with your quote from Luke. Yes, everything written about Jesus in the Law of Moses (Leviticus through Deuteronomy), the Prophets (not gonna name them all) and the Psalms (self-evident) must be fulfilled.

But first, the creation account isn't about Jesus. It's about the creation. And secondly, where Jesus does come into that account, namely, in the promise to Eve that her seed will crush the serpent, Jesus did fulfill that.

So if you're really going to assert that to understand Jesus and the Gospel you of necessity must believe in a literal Genesis 1, please just understand that in doing so you're writing off a lot of very devout, dedicated Christians throughout history who disagreed with you.

Final note: do yourself a favor and when you have some time go read through some more of iMonk's archives. I tend to only link the controversial ones, but if you take the time to get to know him through his writing you will understand that this guy is a serious, thoughtful believer who has devoted his life to teaching the Gospel to young people. He's not someone who should be dismissed lightly.

Well, that's plenty for now. Look forward to continuing the conversation!

I don't think any of us are gonna disagree that yeah, we have to believe that "the Bible means what it says", but we also have to agree that interpretation is needed. We have to use context, genre, etc to understand. That's just inherent in any language-based communication. For instance, I know that your whole 'die on the hill with the trench and bazooka' statement is a metaphor, and that you're not literally looking for a shovel right now. :-) So I think we have to agree that we have to think about what the Bible is trying to tell us, and not just think that we can read every passage literally. I hope that makes sense.

To your two questions, which are good questions:

1) I don't think we can get from the Genesis text that the universe came into being over millions of years. But I also don't think that the purpose of Genesis 1 is to be a science textbook - I think the purpose is to tell us that God is the awesome, omnipotent creator of everything. Genesis 1 is setting the basis for the Gospel story that takes the whole Bible to tell. I would assert that whether the creation of Genesis 1 took place over 144 hours some 8000 years ago, or whether the creation took place over some much longer period of time, it doesn't affect the truth of what Genesis 1 is trying to tell us, which is that God created everything out of nothing.

2) So what does the old earth explanation buy us? Well, it helps potentially make sense of all of the science that's been done that really really points to an old universe. Even if you want to write off things like radio carbon dating, etc, it really is reasonable to look at things like the expansion of the universe and conclude that the universe is really old. So if you're going to assert that Genesis 1 has to be read literally, then you have to start coming up with reasons why good science (including a lot of science done by Christians) disagrees, and then you start getting into things that seem kinda silly to me now, like God creating the universe with "apparent age" just to fool us all.

I would also point out that in the history of science and Christianity, we've been through this before. Copernicus figured out that the planets rotate around the sun, rather than everything rotating around the earth (as had been previously believed). His scientific discovery (done completely with mathematics and physics, and not with repeatable experiments) was rejected by the Church and those who carried on his work were persecuted by the church for a bunch of years. We just accept it now as the way things are, and we have decided to interpret things like Joshua 10 differently in retrospect. Might we be in the same sort of spot now? Worth thinking about.

Yeah, bro, read it again, and try to not react quite so much. Be willing to think about it. OK, so you may want to discount iMonk, but look at the names of others that he points out don't hold the YEC position. R. C. Sproul? I don't think you want to discount him so quickly without being willing to think about it.

Let's be honest - there are lots of passages in the Bible that we understand that we're not supposed to read literally. iMonk notes Revelation 1, for example. Do we think Jesus really has a literal sword coming out of his mouth? Or do we need to read Revelation as a piece of apocalyptic literature and understand that some of it is figurative?

Same question about Joshua 10 where it says that the sun stood still and the moon stopped. Based on what we understand about our universe and astronomical mechanics, do you really think we're literally supposed to understand that the sun and moon completely stopped moving? Or is there some other understanding we can have that still agrees that God did something miraculous, but that it probably didn't involve the entire universe grinding to a halt for two hours while the Israelites fought their battle?

If we can agree that there are parts of the scripture that have to be understood in not only their literary context but also their literary genre, then I don't think we're out of line to think about passages like Genesis 1 and try to understand what genre that book is, especially the first few chapters.

I'll admit this is a departure in thinking from what we were taught as kids - heck, we watched most of those Ken Ham videos in Sunday School at one point or another - but I think these are valid questions to ask and areas to explore.

Remember that Paul wrote to Timothy that all Scripture is God-breathed, and profitable for teaching, instruction, etc etc. What Paul didn't say is that all Scripture is to be understood literally at the expense of everything else that we see around us. There's a lot of ideas to explore here, I look forward to discussing them with you.