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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