My last paragraph minimises the distance between the practical consequences of
my approach versus Kline's, apparently limiting them to methodological ones.
This is not quite correct in at least one important respect. Professor Kline's
view is explicitly non- (or even anti-) concordist, at least for Gen 1 (I think
his last footnote makes it clear that his position is more concordist for Gen
2-3). My own conclusions, though they could perhaps be construed in a
non-concordist (e.g. complementarian) way, lend themselves more to a mildly
concordist mode. I just want to be careul what this entails, however.
I suppose the conclusions themselves could go with a more strongly concordist
approach such as Newman-Eckelmann or Ross, but I'm not sure they require that.
A lot depends on what kind of "speech act" Gen 1 is supposed to be, and what
kind of space-time claims it is making. That's why I'm still thinking about how
to state things in a "testable" way. Perhaps an example would be, Gen 1 would
lead us to believe (via the repeated "and God said") that something is added to
raw matter to organise it, especially into life-forms. We would not therefore
expect to find matter with self-generated complexity (using Thaxton's
terminology). [Please take this as a tentative example, not a settled
conclusion.]
Anyhow, I think this better frames the differences. I welcome input.
Jack Collins