> Sometime ago I asked, Why we do not have theistic evolutionary textbooks?
>
> My main concern was to establish the fact that indeed TEs are content to
> teach out of the books that atheists write and use.
>
> Strangely, there was flurry of explanations and comments. One was that the
> Bible was NOT a book of science
>
> While I agree that the Bible was not meant to be about science, ***it is
> about history.***
>
> Evolution and Creation are histories. The truth of the history in Bible is
> crucial to our theology.
>
Are all historical details equally "crucial" to our theology?
> Does anyone want to claim that the Bible is not a book of history?
Taking hubris in hand (or fingertips :-), I offer this one-sentence
review: The Bible is a book which records God's historical revelations to
human beings -- the revelatory events themselves, their meanings, their
consequences.
Some passages, such as Exodus or Joshua or Kings or Nehimiah, are
obviously history-plus-commentary. (I'm VERY glad to see that their
narratives are so well-confirmed by archeological finds.) Some passages,
such as Psalms, are not. It is reasonable to read Genesis 1 as
"straightforward history," but that is not the ONLY reasonable,
theologically sound way to read it. I'm getting in over my head on
hermeneutics here, so I'll leave it to folks who know more to comment
further.
There is a chapter in the book _Portraits_of_Creation_ (I believe it is
chapter 4, written by Davis Young [?]) which describes how geologists
several centuries ago TRIED very hard to interpret their data in terms of
a young-earth, literal-historical reading of Genesis 1. Over the decades
as data accumulated, this became increasingly difficult. No matter what
you believe about the creation and evolution issue, I highly recommend
reading that chapter (if not the whole book!). It provides an excellent
historical context and "case history" for this sort of debate.
----------
Are "TEs content to teach out of the books that atheists write and use"?
The answer is, "Yes, JUST as much as Christian economists, historians,
and mathematicians are content to teach out fo books that atheists write
and use."
Textbooks are tools to help the teacher. Ideally, a Christian teacher
will find a textbook which not only presents the technical aspects of the
subject matter well, but also is (1) written from a Christian perspective.
Sometimes a teacher has to settle for a book (2) which tries hard to avoid
taking any philosophical/religious position, or even one which (3) slips
in a little non-Christian perspective. This makes the Christian teacher's
job more difficult, because he or she has to spend more time "correcting"
the philosophical tone of the textbook; however, the ease and thoroughness
with which the textbook presents the technical material may offset this.
I can well imagine a Christian teacher teaching from a "textbook that
atheists write and use" about macroeconomics, or the history of the French
Revolution, or anatomy, or stellar dynamics, or evolutionary biology. I
think it's much less likely a Christian teacher will teach from an
"atheistic textbook" about social policy for the poor, or the history of
Isreal, or medical ethics, or science-and-public-policy.
I hope some experienced Christian teachers & professors will comment more
about this (as Terry Gray has already done).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Life is full of PRECLUDED possibilities." | Loren Haarsma
--Calvin (_Calvin_and_Hobbes_) | lhaarsma@opal.tufts.edu