In response to something Glenn had said, I wrote,
>>> Beneath these statements is the tacit assumption that if both A and B are
>>> human products, they must be of equal quality. I don't think you really
>>> believe that.
>
On 10/12/04 5:52 PM, "bivalve" <bivalve@mail.davidson.alumlink.com> wrote:
> What is a human product?
>
> If A and B are both purely human products in the sense of being mental
> constructs that in no way reflect any external reality, then they are of
> equally untestable quality.
OK. But I was talking about the biblical text being a humanly crafted
account of the authentic human experience of the presence of the Sacred
(God).
> If A and/or B, though throughly human products in the sense of resulting from
> human action, also have some relationship to external reality, then there is
> the potential to compare and assess them.
Agreed. That should be the case for both science and theology, presuming
that both the physical world and God are a reality (even though our
knowledge of each is incomplete and subject to misunderstanding).
> As Howard asserted that the Bible reflects human experience of the divine, I
> don't think he is claiming that it is a purely human product.
Good clarification. What I have suggested is that crafting the _description_
of the human experience of God was done entirely by the writers of the
biblical text. Neither the words of the text nor the various portraits of
God that they convey are drawn directly or completely from some divine data
bank. That's why the text is marked by all of the attributes of human
literature -- incompleteness, inaccuracies, misunderstandings, historical
conditioning, cultural conditioning, etc. That's why the text should neither
be idolized nor taken as the last word on any topic. God did not write the
biblical text. Nonetheless, it is a very valuable human testimony to the way
in which the Hebrews and the early Christian community experienced God and
Jesus.
> I think what
> Glenn wants is the criteria by which one tests these claims of experience.
> Howard suggested that the Biblical accounts are not neccessarily correct.
> This requires some standard of correctness to whcih they can be compared and
> found wanting. What are the standards?
Good question. Unavoidably, it involves a lot of human judgment -- the best
we know how to practice. Admitting this essential role for human judgment
should, in principle, help us to avoid making overblown claims for the
certainty of our understanding of God and to instill in us the humility to
respect those who describe their experience of God differently -- Jews,
Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and the like.
As I see it, viewing the text in the way that I have described also
eliminates the need for the endless and sometimes strident debates
(including debates on this list) concerning how to bring the text into
agreement (concord) with modern knowledge of science or history, and it
would similarly eliminate the need to contrive convoluted and/or bizarre
ways of interpreting some particular text in order to remove the appearance
of inconsistencies with other portions the Bible. The biblical text need not
be accurate by the standards of modern science or history. The biblical text
need not be 100% internally consistent. We waste huge amounts of energy in
trying to defend unrealistic claims about our revered text. The text can be
revered and valuable to us even if it is a humanly crafted document.
Howard Van Till
Received on Wed Oct 13 08:38:10 2004
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