> 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/
-- George L. Murphy gmurphy@raex.com http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
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