Re: The importance of concordism

From: glenn morton (mortongr@flash.net)
Date: Sun Jan 09 2000 - 09:23:07 EST

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    At 02:33 PM 1/9/00 -0500, George Murphy wrote:
    > Certainly claims that certain accounts are historically accurate should be
    >supportable with historical evidence. In addition, it should be clear
    that the Bible
    >contains a good deal of historical material. It is quite another matter,
    however, to
    >argue that all biblical texts which have the superficial appearance of
    historical
    >narrative must either be historically accurate or at least contain some
    minimum of
    >historically accurate material. There are at least 3 basic errors of this
    type of
    >concordism.
    > 1) It flies in the face of the internal evidence of Scripture itself with
    its
    > differing accounts of the same phenomena (of which Gen.1 & 2
    are only the
    > most prominent) which shows that the goals and standards of the
    biblical
    > writers were in many cases very different from those of 19th
    century
    > European historians.

    This argument can only be applied to the usual interpretation of Genesis.
    It does not apply to the Days of Proclamation interpretation which I
    advocate. Why? Because Genesis 1 and 2 are not recountings of the same
    event in that intepretation. Genesis 1 is the pre-planning of the universe
    and Genesis 2 is the actual creation of man many billions of years after
    the pre-planing stage which actually occurred before time. So, in my
    opinion, this argument is ineffectual against the views I advocate but
    quite effective against the 2 accounts theory.

    > 2) It assumes that "history as it really happened" is the only way
    in which
    > truth - & especially theological truth - can be conveyed, an
    assumption
    > which can be reductio ad absurdumed with numerous examples.

    Actually it doesn't imply that all. I know of almost no one who advocates
    this position anyway so it is probably a bit of a red herring. Almost all
    christians agree that theological truth can be proffered by other means.
    The question is: Is early Genesis meant to be one of these other means or
    is it history? One can't use your number 2 to determine the answer to that
    question because no one holds to the global application of it anyway.

    > 3) By focussing so strongly on finding some historical events to
    which texts
    > might refer, it can fail to call attention to the real message
    of the text.

    This is where I would apply the Columbine example. We shouldn't pay any
    attention to whether or not Bernall actually said what was reported or not
    because we might miss the 'real' message of the story.????? WHich is what
    those people in the story were saying. To me, this is untenable and a bit
    unethical to not care whethere or not something purported to be history is
    really history. Admittedly it isn't quite so clear cut in the case of
    Genesis as far as whether or not it was meant to be history, but the
    account certainly reads as history

    > Biblical texts need to be studied without the a priori assumption that
    they are
    >all historical narrative.

    Once again you are using the global 'all'. That is not what concordists do
    with Genesis. They don't look for ways to make something nonhistorical just
    because it conflicts a bit with modern knowledge. A concordist tries to
    make accounts that appear and read as history be historical. I know of only
    one Christian who says that Genesis 1:1 is not real history. If God created
    the heavens and the earth, then this is a historical statement. If not,
    then its not.

     Some, of course, are. & even in those which aren't, there
    >may be embedded some historical referents. I don't consider it
    "concordism" in this
    >sense to point out that Gen.2:10-14 refers to at least a couple of real
    rivers, or even
    >to argue that thus all 4 are probably real. It would be another matter to
    have four
    >names of rivers which couldn't easily be identified but to assume that
    they _must_ refer
    >to rivers which can be identified in present-day geography.

    Why? Rivers change course. The Ohio River used to flow far north of where
    it does now. I forget the name of the paleo channel but it was a very big
    river. When the glaciers came, it filled the riverbed with till and forced
    the Ohio to its present location. When the glaciers melted, the old river
    was buried and the new is what we have today. This wasn't discovered until
    this century. It was a real river which if someone had written of it in the
    1700s, everyone would have doubted its existence. Indeed, this is how many
    archaeological sites were found--Troy comes to mind. The hittites were
    previously thought to be fantasy peoples spoken of in the Bible. So just
    because we can't identify everything doesn't warrant the assumption that
    they didn't exist.

    glenn

    Foundation, Fall and Flood
    Adam, Apes and Anthropology
    http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm

    Lots of information on creation/evolution



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