I absolutely agree with you here. I would ask you, if there was NO Noachic
flood, and NO a bunch of Hebrew slaves escaping from Egypt, and there was
NO evidence that a Jewish carpenter who
was crucified was seen alive after his death, would it still be theological
truth? I know you would not believe it was theologically true under those
conditions and neither would I. I just don't see how we can separate the
two parts of this coin. We need reality at the base in order to have
theological truth. They are inseparable.
Some interpretation in
>terms of God - i.e., a theological interpretation - of those events is
necessary.
>We still need to find out what the texts means theologically, though we
may have
>thought it proper to delay that task until we'd looked at the other
matters. & when
>we do ask theological questions, we have to confront the problems of
diversity of
>interpretation we would have had at the beginning.
I agree with you here. We do need to understand the text theologically.
> 2) It might be easier if all the biblical writers had shared exactly the
same
>theological viewpoint, but they didn't. There are "lots of theologies" in
the biblical
>text itself, before we even get to post-biblical interpretations. The
theological task
>is not to ignore the differences or homogenize the theologies of the
different writers,
>but to discern & explicate the "one faith" of Eph.4:5 which is expressed
in those
>different ways.
I would go back to caution that if there are lots of theologies in the
Bible, it is even more crucial that there be an objective basis to those
events. If all we have is theology, then which theology is the correct
theology? Some of them (like the passages that could be interpreted as
indicating polytheism), are contradictory with others (like the passages
that indicate monotheism). There is no middle ground in those cases.
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution