Re: After their kind
Bill Hamilton (hamilton@predator.cs.gmr.com)
Mon, 22 Jul 1996 09:15:06 -0400Glenn Morton quoted me:
>
>>Okay. I'm one of those guys who have been arguing that it is not the
>>intention of Genesis to convey the Young-earth view--conveniently leaving
>>out any mention of what the writer(s) thought about the issue.It would be
>>interesting to know (and probably impossible to know) whether the
>>writer(s) made a distinction between the truth about God they were
>>conveying and the context they were conveying it in -- ANE views of
>>cosmology and culture. IOW there are two sets of intentions involved
>>here: God's and the writer's. The writer's intentions were the
>>necessary result of the fact that all messages are conditioned culturally
>>to some extent and were not necessarily in opposition to God's intent in
>>inspiring the writer(s) to produce the document.
>
>You are close to falling into the trap I couldn't get out of. If God,
>being God, knew the truth about the creation, and inspired an account in
>Genesis, it is quite possible that God's intention was to convey the
>truth(God not being a liar) but the writer's understanding of the message
>may have been very incomplete. Thus it is quite possible for God's
>intention to be something other that the traditional view. Of course, I
>vote for the Days of Proclamation view.
>
I'm puzzled by this response. I'm not sure what trap Glenn is writing
about, but I pretty much agree with the remainder of the paragraph. I
probably muddied the waters by discussing the writer's intentions v. God's
intentions. Let me try again. I believe Genesis, as is all Scripture, is
inspired by God. I am convinced that the writer intended to convey to his
readers what God had conveyed to him. However, like Paul, who saw wonders
he could not describe in heaven (II Cor 12:2-4), Moses probably had to
wrestle with how to describe to his readers what God had revealed to him.
And the result, while it conveys the message God intends it to, almost
certainly contains details that are of value in understandign the ANE
culture, but are not part of the core message. Moses' intentions were
aimed at answering questions like, "How do I write what God has told me so
that readers will understand it?"
BTW, I strongly suspect that the fact that God communicated the Torah to
Moses several thousand years ago and completed His written revelation
nearly two thousand years ago ought to serve as a warning to us modern
"sophisticates" that you don't need any of the human learning that has
developed over the past several thousand years to be able to understand
what God is telling us in Scripture.
Bill Hamilton | Chassis & Vehicle Systems
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