> "Now Theology is like a map. Merely learning and thinking about
>Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than
>the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they
>are only a kind of map. But that map is based on hundreds of people who
>really were in touch with God - experiences compared with which any thrills
>or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary
>and very confused.
One of my concerns in this area is that we christians have a tendency to
replace the Scripture with our theology. A case in point is the very
widespread assumption that the Bible rules out evolution. It is an
assumption of a large part of the ID crowd (otherwise they wouldn't be
anti-evolutionists); it is an assumption of the Young-earth creationists.
This position is derived from the idea that God must miraculously and
instantly create all the animals either in six days in the case of the YECs
or over a period of time in the case of most ID folk. This is then imposed
upon the Scripture to make it say something that it really doesn't say--it
is imposed on the 'after their kind' statements of Genesis 1 to make them
read 'animals reproduce after their kind' when in fact the Scritpure
nowhere contains that statement. The Bible actually says, 'let the Land
[subject] bring forth animals [object] after their kind' If anything this
statement proclaims the reproductive capacities of land rather than that of
animals.
And interestingly, the Bible never actually says that God created
'instantly' either. That is our theology running amok. When the Bible says,
God said,'Let there be light' and it was so. It doesn't say 'and it was so
INSTANTLY'. Our theology adds the 'INSTANTLY' which then leads us to
misread the 'after their kind' statements. There could have been lots of
time between God's statement and the fulfillment. Or does our theology
require that God be in a hurry?
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution