glenn morton wrote:
>
> At 03:38 PM 1/18/00 -0500, George Murphy wrote: ..............................
>> Before evolution was taken seriously people tended
> to read into
> >the text their picture of the way things happened from their experience of
> nature -
> >which is what you're now trying to do with evolution.
>
> Well, I have agreed with you that we all do this and I see no way for any
> of us to avoid it to some extent. But since we all do it, it does give
> quite a large latitude to our interpretations many of which have been
> entirely overlooked. ...............................
We can't entirely eliminate the tendency we all have to interpret texts in
conformity with our own ideas. But we can examine our presuppositions, be aware of
what we're doing with them, & try to make appropriate corrections. It seems to me
that one of the problems of concordism is that it encourages people to think that
current scientific understandings _ought_ to be in biblical texts & therefore to
read them in whether they're really there or not. I don't want to say that such
correlations can't ever be present, but I don't think they have to be & am suspicious
of claims to find ideas in a text which, as far as we know, were otherwise unknown to
people of the ancient near east.
That's probably enough for this round. You can close it out if you wish.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jan 21 2000 - 09:20:01 EST