First, what I haven't given up on is the standard of truth. It wouldn't
bother me if Noah took 15 pair of animals, or if something like that, so I
am not an inerrantist. But if I am to believe some story that claims to be
divinely inspired and claims to tell me something of my relationship with
God, I want more certainty than warm and fuzzy feelings and I want more
certainty than my parents told me this was true. All parents around the
world representing all religions, tell their kids that their religion is
true. But they all can't be true.
>Two things need to be understood to accept Genesis as allegory without
>loosing faith in Christ. The first is that the Old and New Testaments do
>not represent prophecy and its fulfillment, but two separate religious
>accounts that have been artificially forced together because the followers
>of the new religion were converts from the old, a situation unique in
>religious history. This realization should allow you to separate your
>Christian faith from your scholastic curiosity, because it allows you to
>treat the historical and theological accounts of the New Testament as
>separate from the accounts in the Old Testament, though not necessarily as
>independent.
If they are 2 separate religious accounts artificially put together, then
they don't really belong together and they probably were inspired by
different gods/people. And I am not interested in worshipping in a
religion inspired by people alone.
>
>The second is that the Old Testament is not the work of God, but of men
>trying to relay the message of God to all mankind (as they saw it).
Then we should reject it utterly if it isn't the work of God. It becomes
merely the Bhagadvadgita or any other religious document--the conception of
men of what god is like. It becomes an anthropomorphism--god created in
man's image. Under that scenario, the OT is historically interesting but
useless as a purveyor of metaphysical truth.
As
>such, these authors could have incorporated accounts they knew were myths
>and legends, even complete fictions, along with histories, law codes, poems,
>philosophical and theological treatises, if they believed that these
>accounts helped to convey some part of that message.
What gets me about this approach is this. Many people who fight young-earth
creationism find young-earth creationists saying things the YEC knows to be
false. They then make the charge that the YEC is 'lying for Jesus'. And
they criticize the YEC for this reprehensible behavior. But then the
theists among those anti-YEC people are willing to accept the OT when the
writers of the OT engaged in precisely the same behavior. If it is OK for
the OT writers to incorporate KNOW FALSEHOODS into their book because it
advanced their theological position, then consistency demands that it MUST
BE ALRIGHT FOR YECS TO TEACH FALSE THINGS TO ADVANCE THEIR THEOLOGICAL
POSITION. What is good for the goose must be good for the gander. Your
position leads to the place where it is OK for the OT to be fiction but not
OK for the YEC books to be fiction.
This realization
>should allow you to separate your appreciation of the Bible as a source of
>religious doctrine from your appreciation of scientific natural history,
>because it allows you to treat each as separate domains independent of the
>other, such that revelation in one cannot contradict revelations in the
>other.
Unfortunately, I live in a world that has a large amount of objective
reality. What you are offering is the willingness to live in two worlds,
one without any objective reality (theology) and the other with it.
>
>I am not trying to dictate to you what you should believe;
I certainly didn't think that, and I am not doing it either. But the issue
of how to interpret the relationship between reality and theology is
certainly worthy of debate. :-)
that is between
>you and God. But I doubt God would be particularly angry if you took a more
>liberal view of the question of Scriptural literature. Just something to
>chew on.
It is not God's anger that I am worried about here. It is his truthfulness
and his reality. He must be real to be angry. And if he is real he must
be capable of influencing this world and not merely be the
creation/anthropomorphism of frightened humanity.
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm