This lengthy dialogue below between George and Glenn seems to ask questions
about God's gift of freedom. What was God's intent with this gift? If we
seek to know the truth with certainty, we have no freedom. The gift of
freedom has to carry with it much uncertainty. We are to choose to believe
in God without that certainty. When we search the Bible for bits of truth
we must read it with this gift in mind. Our sources of truth are reason and
revelation. Inspiration of biblical authors can not guarantee the revelation
of truth without violating God's gift of freedom. We must use reason to test
claimed or recorded revelation. Concordism is one method for testing that
revelation. Meaningful biblical correlations to historical events provide
circumstantial evidence to support reasons to believe.
Jim Stark
> From: glenn morton <mortongr@flash.net>
> Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 20:26:14 +0000
> To: George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com>
> Cc: asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: Re: The importance of concordism
>
> At 08:23 AM 1/11/00 -0500, George Murphy wrote:
>
>> God _didn't_ choose to tell us "literally" how the universe, earth, life &c
>> came into being - there's nothing in the Bible about GUTs, nucleosynthesis,
>> DNA &c. That doesn't mean God didn't know about such things but it's not the
>> way he chose to describe creation.
>>
> What I have, as always objected to, was the situation in which the universe
> came into being in one way but the description which was inspired by God was
> totally different. That is like going to buy a car and being told that you
> will get a beautiful blue Crown Vic with whitewalls, stereo/CD player and
> automatic seats. When you go to pick up the car you find a red Yugo with no
> tires, a walkman and one of those old piano seats that you could rotate to
> raise or lower it. It always strikes me as a bit of a bait and switch
> routine if God can't tell us what actually happend.
>
> I wrote: Agreed. And this raises an interesting conundrum. This seems to be
> a place where all options turn out to be loosers. If God's intent was what
> tradition says it was, then there are problem like: Why wasn't the account
> at least in outline more clearly evolutionary and old earth? And if one goes
> my direction then the problem is: Why was God's inspiration so poor at
> getting across to the inspired what he might or might not have meant? If one
> posutlates that there was no inspiration, then the lack of match with
> reality can easily be understood. If there was inspiration, then one has to
> wonder on the one hand how truthful it was and on the other how it worked
> and how fidelitous it was.
>
>> Or - God's intent was to tell us about his relationship with the world in
>> such
>> a way as to encourage us to make him our ultimate concern & to value the
>> world
>> as our penultimate concern. & as part of that penultimate valuation God
>> wanted us to understand the world - but to learn about it ourselves & not
>> just
>> be given all the answers. Maybe.
>>
> Then if that is what he wanted, He should have left most of the nonsensical
> events out of the inspiration!
>
>
>>> But, the problem with this is that we should not really be interested in the
>>> intentions of the writers. They were human and not divine. They could lie,
>>> they could confabulate wonderful fantasies, like apparently is happening at
>>> Columbine or what happens with the Missing Day story that floats around from
>>> time to time.
>>>
>> If we don't start with some anchoring in what the human writers intended then
>> we open up texts to all sorts of guesses about what the text "really" means
>> and start reading into it our own meanings - which we will of course think
>> are
>> what God really meant.
>>
> Isn't that what we are really doing when we say 'The real purpose of of
> Genesis is to differentiate Judaism from the earth and sky worshipping
> peoples around them and thus Genesis doesn't have to fit science? After
> all, the Bible never clearly says that that was the purpose of Genesis! It
> is merely a guess on the part of the interpretors. It also never clearly
> says, "This part is not to be taken historically" which also means that that
> we are really reading our own meanings into the Bible. I don't completely
> see a way to avoid that no matter what the intepretation is.
>
> Inspiration means that God used the writers in their totality - not just
> their hands but their minds, imaginations, understandings of the world with
> their limitations &c.
>
> I would note that since the above statement is not actually stated in the
> Bible, that you are reading your meaning into the process of inspiration.
> While I agree with what you said, it must surely be acknoweldged that this
> is also an example of seeing what we want to see.
>
>
> We might wish that God had communicated everything to us in Reviews of
> Modern Physics style prose but he didn't. If God chose to use liturgy,
> fiction, myth & metaphor in addition to historical narrative to convey what
> he wanted to then it's our job to learn to understand & appreciate those
> forms in their proper places, not turn them into something else.
>
> Once again the Bible clearly doesn't explain precisely how exegesis is to
> take place. We impose our own form on intepretation. Thus I would merely
> point out, that the best one can do with any interpretation is to be
> internally consistent. No one can avoid seeing what they want to see.
>
>>
>>> What we should be interested in is GOD's intent, not man's. And if the
>>> writers were able to totally mess up God's message to the ages ever
>>> afterward, then what is the good of inspiration?
>>>
>> God's choosing to use writers with their limitations is part of the same
>> package as "the Word was made flesh" on which I commented at the beginning.
>>
> See above.
>
>>
>>> Obviously I don't have good answers for these questions. But I do know that
>>> a
>>> lot of bad things are avoided by having Genesis be a true but simplified
>>> real
>>> account.
>>>
>> I agree that Genesis is true account_s_ & in a sense is simplified - but it
>> is
>> not a simplified version of a modern scientific account - i.e., the sort of
>> thing I'd do if asked to give a talk on cosmology to a 5th grade class.
>>
> But see, if you walked in to that 5th grade class to teach cosmology and
> read Genesis 1 and then concluded with: "This is how God created the world,"
> would you think you had given them the truth? So why is it that we should
> feel that God has given us the truth if it doesn't fit the facts? That is
> why I take the interpretaional approach that I do. I avoid such problems.
>
>
>>
>>>> So your distinction isn't clear. You defended the historicity of Jonah
>>>> rather vigorously, which seems to me neither necessary nor very plausible.
>>>> The rivers in Gen.2 help make the point that the text is about the creation
>>>> of the real world - but so is Gen.1 (I know, I know!) & there aren't any
>>>> names there.
>>>>
>>> But if the information can be inaccurate as you suggest above, why should we
>>> trust anything else about the account? Why should be beleive that it is
>>> accurate that Jehovah created the heavens and the earth yet he can't help
>>> you
>>> find your way home because he can't give accurate geographic information?
>>> This bothers me a lot that God can't ensure the delivery of good information
>>> to us.
>>>
>> Sometimes it bothers me that God doesn't ensure the delivery of the money,
>> leisure time, health of loved ones, world peace &c that I'd like. Maybe God
>> expects me to have something to do with bringing those things about. Maybe
>> God wants us to get some information ourselves.
>>
> But that doesn't address the real issue I am raising which is, why can't God
> tell the truth? You feel that God tells the truth in Genesis 1 when the
> ancients wrote it, but I doubt seriously you would feel the same if a YEC
> came into the class and read Genesis 1 and said that was how God created the
> world. We can't have one standard for God(a lower one) and another for us(a
> higher one).
>
> You can have the last word. I will be busy the next few days with my son's
> marriage to a wonderful young woman. They are both very mission minded and
> he will attend cemetary, I mean seminary the next couple of years or so.
>
> I have enjoyed it as always. 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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