How do Christian apologists get away with telling everyone Biblical literalism is a modern American Protestant phenomenon when even people like Augustine affirmed the historicity of the Bible and believed in young earth creationism?
How do Christian apologists get away with telling everyone Biblical literalism is a modern American Protestant phenomenon when even people like August...
Because pushing back against that narrative would be giving a W to young Earth creationists, who are even worse than the kind of apologist who pretends that young earth creationism is a new phenomenon.
I strongly disagree. Reasonable people laugh off young earth creationists but these apologists are taken seriously by the general public. They do much more damage to the truth.
Because when the Church advanced in its studies of the sciences, it rejected literalism of the Old Testament, and this literalism was only revived by late Protestantism and its American sects.
so you're saying the scientific community is the real church?
Yes. People used to believe in Christianity because they thought it was the real truth. When evidence started pointing heavily to the contrary, the dropped it. The people who doubled down and rejected science were uneducated fanatics, not the truth seekers of the original church.
The truth seekers of the original church believe in it though. Picrel
Sedevacantists are bringing it back to Catholicism. They research what the earlier church said and say this position doesn't belong to the Protestants.
Origen was an OG and he was an allegorist.
Only about the talking snake and magic fruit. Yet he didn't dispute that humanity began with Adam and Eve and he defended the literal truth of Noah's Flood against Marcionites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo
>Augustine took the view that, if a literal interpretation contradicts science and humans' God-given reason, the biblical text should be interpreted metaphorically.
how would they argue that jesus returning from the dead wasn't a metaphor as well?
Yes, and if one applies that principle with the scientific knowledge we have today, they would have to accept that Genesis isn't literal. Augustine, however, didn't have that knowledge and did believe Genesis was literal.
Genesis did contradict the Aristotelian science of the day though. In the Guide for the Perplexed Maimonides goes through great pains to reconcile the two by metaphorically interpreting Genesis. So, a medieval person could have still rejected a literal interpretation of Genesis for scientific reasons without having any knowledge of modern science.
Augustine defended the historicity of the Bible against criticisms in his day.
Augustine literally opposed Christianity for most of his life on the basis that the Bible couldn't have been historically accurate, and accepted it only when told to accept it as metaphor
Are you sure about that?
>They are deceived, too, by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though, reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6000 years have yet passed.
>And therefore the former [Greek history] must receive the greater credit [over Egyptian history], because it does not exceed the true account of the duration of the world as it is given by our documents, which are truly sacred.
>how much less can we believe these documents which, though full of fabulous and fictitious antiquities, they would fain oppose to the authority of our well-known and divine books, ... which proved, too, that it had truly narrated past events by its prediction of future events, which have so exactly come to pass!
Augustine clearly believed that biblical history should be trusted to provide the facts more than any secular account.
Christianity is the religion of Aryans.
https://odysee.com/@Anonymous:ab1/05---The-Not-so-Chosen-People-Part-5---The-Aryans:b
https://odysee.com/@Anonymous:ab1/03---The-Not-so-Chosen-People-Part-3---The-Greeks:5
He also believed the universe was created in a single moment and not in 7 days. He didn't believe in a literal 1000 years kingdom. Augustine was not a literalist.