glenn morton wrote:
>
> At 11:56 AM 1/13/00 -0500, George Andrews wrote:
> >
> >Mostly unborn; and could you define eisegetism for me (Thanks for the
> >compliment?). But to the point: I do not consider "rocks fall toward
> earth" as a
> >scientific description of gravity; likewise, I do not consider "God
> created earth
> >wind and fire" as a description of HOW creation came into being.
>
> Actually eisegetism is something I am often accused of so it was fun
> getting to accuse someone esle. :-) Basically it means reading modern
> views into the ancient texts. And since the entire concept of old earth
> and Genesis
> 1-as-merely-meaning-G0d-created-the-heavens-and-earth-and-little-else view
> is fully modern, that is eisegesis.
More generally, eisegesis is reading any meaning _into_ a text, as distinguished
from exegesis, getting meaning _from_ the text, which is what we're supposed to do - at
least to begin with. Thus e.g. the practice of some concordists of trying to make the
creation of the heavenly bodies on the 4th day "really" their becoming visible on earth
is eisegesis. But it is NOT reading a foreign meaning into the texts to say that Gen.1
& 2 are theological statements which are expressed in terms of the understanding of the
physical world of people of the ancient near east, and that one of our tasks is to
communicate that theological meaning in terms of the scientific understanding of the
world of today.
& that does NOT mean that we just throw out the text of Genesis as it stands.
We still read it, respond to its imagery, & keep on returning to it to discover its
theological significance more fully - which involves in part trying to discern more
clearly what its original authors & redactors meant. If I went to the Easter Vigil &
the first reading wasn't Gen.1 but some pop paraphrase of it in terms of the microwave
background and prebiotic soup, I'd probably walk out.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jan 13 2000 - 13:49:13 EST