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One Love
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| Posted 6/26/2011 8:07 AM (GMT -6) |   | | | |
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One Love
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 6/26/2011 8:22 AM (GMT -6) | | Similtude:
Seems to me once you give up authorial intent, the whole historical Jesus is dead, epistemologically speaking. Cause at that point, we've abandoned induction as far as it works communally.
I don't see why one has to give up authorial intent. What we understand is that authorial intent ALWAYS has a context in which it occurs. Who's to say that God doesn't use a contextual understanding for the sake of eliciting a specifical authorial intent for the sake of communicating a particular concept for the sake of moving his program forward? I'm pretty sure that God knew that the mustard seed wasn't the "smallest of all seeds"...but that still didn't mean that Jesus using that phrase is "wrong" because it wasn't technically correct.
I think there's a Buddhist term for this let me find it...oh, yeah...
Upaya-kaushalya is a concept which emphasizes that practitioners may use their own specific methods or techniques in order to cease suffering and introduce others to the dharma. The implication is that even if a technique, view, etc., is not ultimately "true" in the highest sense, it may still be an expedient practice to perform or view to hold; i.e., it may bring the practitioner closer to true realization anyway. The exercise of skill to which it refers, the ability to adapt one's message to the audience...
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 6/26/2011 8:27:07 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 6/26/2011 8:37 AM (GMT -6) | | | In one sense, it's not important whether there are tons of versions so long as we do the golden rule, right? But what if the only way Jesus gets credit PERSONALLY for our sanctification in the minds of unbelievers is if unbelievers think of Jesus as a particular historical person rather than just a name applied to the benevolent designer of the world? Then it makes all the difference in the world.
So long as we have something objective like parsimony to constrain our arguments to something we can all embrace comunally, there is reason to debate with one another. But apart from something objective to constrain us, why would I argue against anyone? Or for myself? IOW, what can we publicly agree serves as a normative criteria for adjudicating the relative value of an exegetical interpretation? If nothing, then what have we other than private revelation moving us however we're moving? The fact that an interpretation can't be proved false leaves way too many views in the game--views that lead to contradictory judgments of people. We need a criteria that constantly limits progress unto ONE TRUTH. Parimony is one such objective criteria.
Post Edited (Similitude) : 6/26/2011 8:43:47 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 6/26/2011 8:52 AM (GMT -6) | | "The implication is that even if a technique, view, etc., is not ultimately "true" in the highest sense, it may still be an expedient practice to perform or view to hold; i.e., it may bring the practitioner closer to true realization anyway. The exercise of skill to which it refers, the ability to adapt one's message to the audience..."
This would be all well in good if we knew, e.g., that all people that claim to believe in the golden rule REALLY believed in it. People claim to believe a lot of things. What do they do? How do they defend it? Do they use specious arguments? "Why call ye me 'lord, lord' and DO NOT the things I say?" These are the kinds of things that makes Pauls statement meaningful:
"If I give my body to be burned ... but HAVE NOT love, ..."
Words are one thing. Heart belief and understanding are something else. I'm sure the pharisees would have claimed they believed in the golden rule. It was in the Torah after all. But they had their outs. What I see daily at work from church-going people is enough to stagger the mind. Pharisaical hypocrisy is and always has been alive and well. I know I'm ignorant of many of my short-comings. But I see an indifference at work to just obvious wrongs--things that would never be defended publicly. IOW, what if the only people that even have a chance of TRUE love as opposed to mere "natural affection" and its associated impulses are those that already have the Spirit? Then all the Buddhist literature in the world isn't making the relevant difference despite how true it might be in some sense.
Maybe it's only when the historical Jesus gets the credit that TRUE love actually happens. If so, that means we have to figure out what modes of inference get us to an historical Jesus in the first place.
Post Edited (Similitude) : 6/26/2011 9:09:19 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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| Posted 6/26/2011 10:38 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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One Love
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 6/26/2011 12:38 PM (GMT -6) | | | Hmmm...
From there...
In this discussion, we emphasize that many Christians believe the Bible is God inspired and thus contains a meaningful human dimension. The belief that the Bible is God dictated — which reduces the human contribution to insignificance — is popularly known as fundamentalism or biblical literalism. In articulating the implications of the former view, where the biblical authors play a meaningful role, we note the apostle Paul, although inspired by God, wrote his letters within the context of his own time and culture. There was a common language, common understanding of both history and the natural world and generally accepted meanings for the words Paul used. If Paul, along with his original audience, knew nothing of the scientific evidence for human death before the Fall, it stands to reason that Paul would believe likewise. If human death did precede the Fall, Paul’s use of Adam’s curse in first Corinthians 15 is still perfectly understandable given his cultural context.
For reasons like this, a healthy interpretation of Scripture must avoid proof texting, or the habit of creating grand theological structures on single verses of Scripture, or even phrases within verses.First Corinthians 15 is the only Scripture that can be taken to directly address Adam’s physical death, and even there it does so only by way of illustration for an entirely different message: Christ’s resurrection brings us new life. To make this single verse into a scientific authority on the history of death in the human race is dangerous and presumptuous, given the massive evidence to the contrary. Christians throughout history have confirmed the Scriptures need not be authoritative on science, natural history or in other areas not pertaining to salvation. Outside knowledge from the natural world informs our understanding of theology as well, as we learned painfully through the Galileo Affair.
...
Many people are still inclined, however, to connect physical death to the Fall. After all, Adam’s curse concludes with the fate of returning to the dust from which he came (Genesis 3:19):
"By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return."
However, the amount of death in the evolutionary process leading to humans is overwhelming and must be considered. To connect human physical death to the Fall, we must be clear about what it means to be human. It is argued that bearing God’s image is not a matter of our physical appearance but a matter of our capacity to love both God and others, to have dominion over the Earth and to have moral consciousness. In this way we might distinguish between Homo sapiens and the image-bearing creatures that we might call Homo divinus. While Homo sapiens might have a similar body structure or physical capabilities of Homo divinus, the latter exists in God’s image.
With this critically important distinction, BioLogos is thus compatible with the belief that part of Adam’s curse was the onset of physical death for the human race, because the human race in the full Imago Dei really began with Adam. Although many human-like creatures lived and died before the Fall, these Homo sapiens did not yet bear the image of God. After the bestowal of God’s image, there was no death of Homo divinus until after the Fall. As soon as image-bearing humanity fully emerged through God’s creative process of evolution, no member of that species experienced death until after the Fall.
This seems mighty convenient, don't you think?
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 6/26/2011 12:41:08 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 6/26/2011 12:39 PM (GMT -6) | | Some folks use words in very technically precise ways. If Collins etal are using the phrase "scientific evidence" to mean data that is evaluated in terms of naturalistic methodology, then no one in their right mind would disagree that macroevolution occurred by those epistemological constraints. But the minute you mean merely data evaluated in terms of analogy/parsimony, evolution is really problematic. It's hard to know what these people are saying. They live in an academic world where terms have meaning that most folks would not infer.
Any more, the demarcation problem renders most of that language almost meaningless when applied to evolution vs. final causality. Because we don't even know if evolution is falsifiable at all in the sense that other theories are believed to be. I mean who can say they can prove that no sequence of random mutations couldn't result in macroevolution over the posited time-frame, however improbable? We can't prove negatives of that kind, can we? So once we limit ourselves to methodological naturalism, I can't imagine what, other than macroevolution, could be true per anything like an inductive approach.
But what can ground the propriety of constraining ourselves that way seeings how we're not naturalists in any sense of the word? It can't be as simple for us as it is for others who are metaphysically or professionally motivated to live within what would otherwise be arbitrary constraints. I get where Collins is coming from. Once you abandon evolution in his profession, you're toast. So unless you have any kind of exegetical constraints that motivate you sufficiently, why rock the boat? On the other hand, I would like to see those guys ACKNOWLEDGE that there are true inductive concerns in terms of how induction is to be applied to texts, as well. And I never see that from those guys. They seem to act like the whole history of Judaeo-Christian hermeneutics, as applied to topic at hand, is explicable by gross, literary naivete. Not so.
Post Edited (Similitude) : 6/26/2011 12:44:28 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Similitude
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Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 6/26/2011 1:16 PM (GMT -6) | | Let me give an example of what I just said. If something like a more literal reading of Genesis 1-3 is true, then we have the following:
1) We can explain why humans are now said to be sold "under sin" in terms of their having been subjected to a cursed world where they are not, by nature, adapted to harmonious living. It seems much less satisfying to explain sinfulness in terms of a divinely-created sin nature or a radically improbable success of living sinlessly in the current state of affairs.
2) And we can explain the subjection of Adam and Eve to a cursed world in terms of the fittingness of it as a consequence of their sin and they're having been the totality of the human race at the time. Then, it was a natural consequence for future descendants to end up sinning for having been born IN that state.
3) We can explain the problem of evil much easier than the "soul-making" theodicy alone can. Because the radical disparity in degrees and distribution of natural evils implies nothing against God's original GOOD intent for creation, and the "soul-making" theodicy doesn't have to do all the epistemological work. Thus, we can say that ALL ears (or more relevantly, the DNA that codes for the production of ears) were intended for hearing. ALL eyes were intended for seeing, etc--not just the ones that God could KNOW would last long enuff to function in a world full of deadly, natural evils.
Once we move away from that approach, all those kinds of explanations seem less satisfying. It's like a see-saw. You explain one thing easy, something else gets hard.
Post Edited (Similitude) : 6/26/2011 1:38:17 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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BBBCanada
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Date Joined Jun 2001
Total Posts : 2763
| Posted 6/26/2011 3:03 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Obviously, Jeff is more schooled in evolutionary theory than I am. I'm practically a bonehead on the topic. I have old creationist books from high-school days--Henry Morris' "The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth, Duane Gish's, "The Fossils Say No", Henry Morris' and Gary Parker's, "What is Creation Science?" (this is essentially the same book with a different title and only the mention of Morris' name). All of these are "scientific creationist" writings. Sometime ago, I then picked up Alan Hayward's book, "Creation and Evolution: Rethinking the Evidence from Science and the Bible" Hayward attempts a middle ground. Doesn't go for either gradual evolution or scientific creationism.
As I'm not as up on the controversy as Jeff is I do agree with him on some points. Essentially, what I hear Jeff saying is, that there is much debate over evolution (even within the scientific community of evolutionists themselves) but presently, evolution is the best we have to go forward. And it seems to me that you see some of this when he speaks, say, about the fossil record.
I understand that there is much debate about the fossil record. I understand that there different theories posited for say, gaps, what constitutes a transitional form, etc. From the BioLogos foundation:
Indeed, it has become an article of faith for those espousing both the young earth creation (hereafter YEC) model and many who hold to the intelligent design model that transitional fossils do not exist and therefore evolution has not taken place. Support for this position usually entails attacking the weak areas of the fossil record, where burial processes have left us little with which to work, or the creation of straw men arguments in which transitional fossils are defined in such a way that none could ever be found. Often this centers on the concept of “missing link,” a term that is habitually used in the popular press and young earth creation and intelligent design literature when referring to fossil remains but which has little to no meaning for biologists or palaeontologists. As Ahlberg and Clack (Ahlberg and Clack 2006) write:
Phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relatedness among organisms.
But the concept has become freighted with unfounded notions of evolutionary ‘progress’ and with a mistaken emphasis on the single intermediate fossil as the key to understanding evolutionary transitions. Much of the importance of transitional fossils actually lies in how they resemble and differ from their nearest neighbours in the phylogenetic tree, and in the picture of change that emerges from this pattern.
Contrary to common misconceptions, the fossil record does not record one single lineage for any family of organisms but rather a series of branches, with many related species coexisting synchronously.
So I really don't say that there isn't any theories or debates, etc. But, given what the BioLogos Foundation is saying (the evidence for evolution is overwhelming) and what I think I'm hearing Jeff say, (that evolution is the best we have going on right now), D's question for many black churches and Sunday school teachers, etc is definitely an important one. Given that as it may be, the question of how you fit a literal Adam with evolution is truly important (if that is what Paul believed, which I believe he did, but think he was a man of his time and may have been wrong, though that doesn't seem to necessarily shake the Gospel foundation as some might think).
Check out these vids and let me know what you think. You have to especially watch the third one in its entirety.
N.T. Wright and Pete Enns: What Do You Mean by Literal?
Peter Enns on the Apostle Paul and Adam
Lecture: Eramus Lecture--Peter Enns, Feb 9, 2011
Brandon
Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.--Saint Augustine
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Tom
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| Posted 6/26/2011 3:38 PM (GMT -6) | | | Listen to Wright here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BP1PpDyDCw&NR=1) and you’ll hear him admit (very strangely) that though Gen 1-3 is largely myth, he DOES think it’s necessary to believe that there was “something like a primal pair who get it wrong.” Does he not know that even this most basic of historical claims is out the window since there is no historical pair.
Peter Enns on Adam and Eve also (on youtube) talked himself right into a corner. He never really answered the question.
T
KIXYTΘEMTAPost Edited (Tom) : 6/26/2011 3:41:30 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 6/26/2011 3:54 PM (GMT -6) | | D: I don't see why one has to give up authorial intent.
T: You don't give it up in the sense of having to say authors have no intentions. They intend to say something (historically, theologically, etc.). And usually we can discern what this intention is.
What you do give up (I think) is the role that authorial intention plays in determining the limits of what we're permitted to say is that meaning which carries whatever divine authority you wish to attribute to Scripture.
It would help me, D, if you could actually DO the sort of reading you're talking about. Take Rom 5, for example, and tell us how you go about discerning the authoritative word of God in it once the historical legs on which Paul's *intented meaning are removed. How does once decide the divine intention once it's divorced from authorial intention (or at least from select portions of the author's intended meaning)? So, for example, what IS the theological point regarding "death" that you take in as authoritative and how did you get it from the text? I think what happens is that the theological point Paul makes about death ultimately gets dismissed along with the particular history that LED PAUL to conclude what he does theologically. So maybe we just remove that portion of Paul's teaching from what we consider to be authoritative and true. Is that what you do?
T
KIXYTΘEMTAPost Edited (Tom) : 6/26/2011 5:12:56 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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