Ex-Church of Christ Support Board

Hi everyone. I still attend a coc in Tennessee. I've had concerns for a long time on nit picky doctrines that don't feel important, etc... I feel that often my congregation misses the "weightier matters" while stressing things that don't matter.

Latest example and tipping point, 2 lessons in the past 3 weeks about the earth being 6,000 years old. Including one phrase "anyone who says the earth is billions of years old has an agenda against God."

Looking for advice and answers
Thanks!!

Welcome!

Welcome aboard!

Wow.
when I was young (decades past) and in The Church, that idea was not really mainstream, although certainly SOME members thought it was important. Others regarded it as not important at all, or not important enough to draw a line in the sand about, at least.

For the record, 'the Bible' says no such thing. The idea that the Earth is 6000 years old (or thereabouts) comes entirely from various people adding up stated ages in the genealogies, without understanding, even, that the geneaologies themselves are not necessarily complete (that is, we are pretty sure that they sometimes mention only the IMPORTANT figures, skipping over the forgettable ones - and also, some of those genealogies are more about the founding of cities, then they are about the production of sons.

6000 years actually - in the real world of verifiable facts, that is - puts us back at ABOUT the time of the invention of writing. It is CERTAINLY nowhere close to the actual age of the Earth. And it is equally nowhere close to the actual history of actual humans. 6000 years ago, there were already two major civilizations at least, and there were already Native Americans building different cultures in North and South America. There were already cities - Jericho is nearly ten thousand years old. Beth Shean is around six or eight thousand years old, at least.

Some Bible scholars who want to maintain the importance of the genealogical ages, say that the counting of years (that '6000 years' number) only STARTED when Adam and Eve left the garden of Eden, and the age of the EARTH is, of course, FAR older than that.

Others - well, others come up with a dozen's dozen of possible ways to calculate things with numbers, but many view the whole process of calculation as both pointless and also unimportant in the extreme, and not worth the effort.

AverageGuyinTN wrote: ↑Mon May 03, 2021 1:42 pmLatest example and tipping point, 2 lessons in the past 3 weeks about the earth being 6,000 years old. Including one phrase "anyone who says the earth is billions of years old has an agenda against God."

Science denialism was not around when I was in the CofC. In fact, science was used profusely, especially with respect to medical science, in defining how Christ died and what his body went through, etc. Science denialism is a more recent evolution that I believe started in other evangelical churches, now apparently must be sweeping into Churches of Christ. Really, if there is no grey matter to figure out that science is a revelation of God, that it is seeing God and his physical rules of the structure of existence more clearly, then there is not going to be a coexistence as between you and they. Their own physical health and well being longevity is based in medical science, so any of them who pop a pill in their mouths must have an agenda against God. Believing in the truth that science reveals does not demand a conclusion that miracles do not or cannot exist, or that other dimensions of "existence" do not or cannot exist. And it never has to set up a contradiction with Biblical interpretation because the Bible itself does not profess to be a scientific revelation.

My recommendation is that you bail and look for groups with functional grey matter. Welcome, by the way!

The CoC I was raised in usually quoted 2 Peter 3:8 (“But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”) to say that the creation story occurred over a metaphorical seven days.

But on top of that was quite a bit of equivocating. Although scripture is taken literally by the CoC, this did not necessarily mean that God took 6000 years to create the universe and then took a thousand years off. That math still didn’t add up to allow for dinosaur fossils and such. So, in this case, the metaphor was doubled down to mean simply that God doesn’t count time like we do. Genesis 1 was still literally true, but the seven days was a metaphor for a really long time.

Now that I think about it, they’d also have had to say the ages of the people in those genealogies that add up to the supposed young earth would have to be metaphorical ages, because none of this sleight of hand gets us anywhere close to the actual birth of the planet some 4.5 billion years ago, much less to the origins of the universe 13+ billion years ago . If all that had been brought up, then the discussion would probably have changed to the need to have faith and trust the bible.

That said, the Genesis creation story is a beautiful, wonderful tale, seeking to probe our deepest questions of who we are and why we are here.