My view is that Professor Kline's article raises a number of very important
methodological issues. I'm sending a letter to PSCF outlining some of these;
but I'll try to hit a few points here and see what happens.
The first to mention is one that several correspondents have already hit on: how
does someone who is not an expert in the discipline of Biblical exegesis judge
Kline's views? And what are you supposed to do if I, who claim expertise in
this discipline, express disagreement with him? Apart from the specific views
themselves, I think in an interdisciplinary setting it would be helpful to make
one's procedure for drawing conclusions more transparent. It would also be
helpful to let non-experts know whether there is any debate on the data
themselves and their low-level interpretation, as well as on their high level
interpretation. You will have to take my word for it that there is a lot in
that article that could be debated.
A further question relates to the method of exegesis itself. At one time it was
possible to call theology a "science", and simply to mean by it that it was an
identifiable discipline by which one tries to expalin systematically one's
observations of empirical data, with a public and reason-based methodology.
(According to lexicographers, this changed in the 19th century.) Anyhow, is
there a "scientific method" for theology and exegesis? I contend that there is,
and that it should be based on the study of how language in general, and the
Biblical languages in particular, work to communicate (since our data is "text",
i.e. the Bible). My own research has involved taking methods in modern
linguistics (especially semantics and textlinguistics/discourse analysis) and
seeing if we can't use them consistently for our hermeneutics. I do not think
that Professor Kline's article is based on this kind of approach, for reasons I
will delineate in my letter to PSCF.
In my own article I concluded that the "days" of the creation week are an
anthropomorphism to describe God's activity (an exegetically based articulation
of a view found in Augustine, and even earlier). In so far as Gen 1 touches on
time, we are not linguistically able to eliminate completely all succession in
the days; however, since that succession is itself part of the anthropomorphic
description, there will always be uncertainty as to how this relates to "the
experience and knowledge of us earthbound men" (Augustine's phrase). I further
tried to suggest that therefore empirical investigation, and not exegesis, can
help us learn such things as how long ago God created the universe; what kind of
overlap there is between the various "days" of the creation week; to what extent
items of a particular "day" have been classed together for logical rather than
chronological reasons (clearly not an exhaustive list). I did not try in any
extensive way to translate my exegetical conclusions into the kinds of
statements that could be "tested": I am still thinking about that.
Perhaps you will laugh, though, if you see that in many ways Kline and I are not
that far apart when it comes to applying our conclusions to the practice of
science: compare his final note with my results (I don't think we're identical,
though, but a lot depends on definitions and matters outside of Gen 1:1-2:3).
Nevertheless, there are some important differences in method, which will have
long-range consequences.
So: what do you all think about that?
Jack Collins