Chuck Austerberry gave the following as his response to the article "Genesis
Reconsidered" by Held and Rust in the Dec, 1999, issue of PSCF:
>Harmonization is an interesting approach to integrating science and
>Biblical interpretation, especially of the early chapters of Genesis.
>Personally I don't engage in harmonization, but I appreciate the respect
>some harmonizers, like Glenn Morton and Dick Fischer, give to science.
[skip a bit]
> I'm interested in other's views, but here are mine. God indeed inspired
> the Biblical authors, but the knowledge so transmitted was not "prophetic
> narrative." Rather, it was knowledge of God's character and will. "Myth"
> is used in an everyday sense to mean a fanciful, erroneous story, but in
> religion it means something more valuable and significant than that, just
> as what scientists mean by "theory is more valuable and significant than
> the meaning of "theory" in its everday sense of hunch or guess. Yes,
> historical criticism has gone too far sometimes, and yes, the Bible is not
> like other old books, but the scholarly methods used to study ancient texts
> can and should be applied to the Bible. The trend to disparage
> harmonization did not result from "inadequate care" in interpretation, but
> rather a lot of honest and careful hermeneutical scholarship.
> How do others view Held and Raun's defense of harmonization?
Chuck, I think I'm in (or at least near) your camp.
To be candid, I find Held and Rust's style of harmonization (ordinarily
called "concordism") to have little or no value for me in my reflections on
the physical nature of the creation or the particulars of its formational
history. I see no reasonable basis for the widespread expectation that there
should be extensive correlation, or "concord," between the text of early
Genesis and the outcome of modern scientific theorizing about what
particular physical processes and events may have contributed to the
formation of the various structures and forms in the universe to which God
has given being.
Early Genesis was written in the conceptual vocabulary of the Ancient Near
East and, I believe, within the limits of human knowledge of the day. Modern
scientific theorizing, on the other hand, is written in the conceptual
vocabulary of contemporary Western culture and is, I believe, also limited
by the human knowledge of the day.
I do believe, of course, that scientific theorizing and biblical
interpretation should each be done in the awareness of what the other can
contribute to our comprehensive worldview, but I see no basis for the kind
of concordism espoused by Held and Rust. Furthermore, there are as many
different versions of concord as there are proponents of concordism.
To continue on this provocative note, I would propose that the concordism
that is so common in the conservative evangelical Christian community today
is a major contributing factor in the continuing and increasingly
dissipative shouting match known as the 'creation-evolution debate.' I pray
for an end to this wasteful effort to force the biblical text to be
something wholly different from what it is. Endless arguments on which
particular version of "concord" is best has distracted Bible readers from
the kind of inspired reflection that it stimulated in its hearers/readers 2
or 3 millennia ago.
Candidly yours,
Howard Van Till
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