>From: george murphy <gmurphy@raex.com>
> There is often resistance to the idea that the Holy Spirit & the
> biblical writers accomodated themselves to scientific understandings of
> the world of their times & cultures, views which we now know to be very
> limited or wrong. The same people seem to have no problem accepting
> this with some of the morality accepted in scripture.
George follows this with several examples of human behavior accepted by the
biblical writers (and the Holy Spirit also?) but now considered (by the vast
majority of Christians, at least) unacceptable -- polygamy, protection
racket, extermination of populations, slavery, etc.
> But such
> examples do make it very clear that the biblical writers, and ultimately
> the Holy Spirit, accomodated themselves to moral behaviors which the
> Jewish and Christian communities would eventually find unacceptable.
It's not at all that clear to me. I would say that the biblical writers
simply incorporated, with approval, references to the accepted practices of
the day. I don't think we have any basis for suggesting that they knew
better, but nonetheless "accommodated" themselves to current (im)moral
behaviors for whatever reason.
I would object even more strongly to the idea that the Holy Spirit was
guilty of the same type of accommodation (knowing better, but going along
with the times) . Why posit that the Holy Spirit practiced such
accommodation in the first place? Is "accommodation" posited for any reason
other than to protect a humanly-crafted theory about the divine inspiration
of every statement in the biblical text?
> So why is it so hard to believe that the biblical writers and
> the Holy Spirit could have accomodated themselves to a now-outdated
> cosmology?
If the protection of a humanly-crafted theory about the divine inspiration
of the canon requires us to posit that the Holy Spirit was willing to be
accommodated to immoral human behavior, should we not question the value of
the theory being so protected? I find this common practice of accusing the
Holy Spirit of accommodation (knowing better, but not saying so) highly
questionable.
It was for reasons such as this that I said a few weeks ago, "So, ... I am
inclined instead to move in the direction of another view of the Bible. (3)
The (Christian) Bible is a thoroughly human testimony to the authentic human
experience of the presence of the Sacred -- specifically, God, as
experienced by the ancient Hebrews and the early Christian community. As
such, the text is indeed "useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and
training in righteousness." Given this as the nature of the text, however,
it may neither be idolized nor treated as the last word on any matter. We
are called, I believe, not to craft theologies whose only source is this
particular ancient historical text, not to simply "say as they said," but
rather to "do as they did" -- that is, to experience the active presence of
God in our own lives and to tell others about it."
Such a view of the canon does not at all lead one to accuse either the
writers of the text or the Holy Spirit of accommodating themselves (knowing
better, but not saying so). I believe that the biblical writers wrote from
their own perspective (both cosmological and moral) and that the Holy Spirit
is not responsible for what these humans wrote.
Howard Van Till
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