Re: Adam never met Eve

From: Howard J. Van Till (hvantill@novagate.com)
Date: Mon Nov 06 2000 - 14:18:34 EST

  • Next message: glenn morton: "RE: Adam never met Eve"

    Hi Glenn,

    I have resisted quick replies on this thread to see how the conversation
    went. It's not going particularly well, but here is one general thought that
    comes to mind.

    You have repeatedly expressed your conviction (or insistence?) that the
    biblical text must be true in the specific sense of being objectively
    verifiable.

    There are, of course, some particular "matters of fact" for which that
    conviction/insistence may well be appropriate. Yet there is a certain irony
    in your wishing to extend this requirement to the entire text (or at least
    the vast majority of it) because this particular concept of truth and its
    verification is so deeply characteristic of modernity and its accompanying
    scientism.

    As such, it stands in marked contrast to a great portion of traditional
    religious thought and experience: we apprehend Truth by opening our hearts
    and minds and spirits to the presence of God, Spirit, Creator, Love,
    Goodness, and various other ways of naming the Transcendent. Truth of this
    sort was available and valued long before the concept of empirical
    verification gained supremacy in post-Enlightenment culture. Furthermore,
    adopting the modern (and reduced) concept of truth as that which can be
    empirically verified strikes me as a capitulation to the Enlightenment's
    restricted concept of Reality and the limited means of apprehending it.

    A couple of weekends ago our church sponsored a series of lectures by Huston
    Smith. One of his themes was his hopefulness that the modern,
    post-Enlightnment loss of humanity's sense of the Transcendent would soon
    end, and that the scientism and materialism characteristic of modernity
    would be replaced by a regaining of our appreciation for the diverse and
    robust ways that humans are capable of apprehending the real presence of
    Transcendence, Truth, God.

    Cordially,

    Howard



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