"Howard J. Van Till" wrote:
> >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 was trying to speak concisely. A fuller statement would of
course have to recognize that the knowledge & accomodation of the
biblical writers & the Holy Spirit differed. I see no reason to think
that the writers & editors of Genesis, e.g., didn't think that there
really was a solid dome of the sky with waters above it &c. That
doesn't mean that the Holy Spirit did.Similarly for the moral examples
that I gave.
> 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?
It's important to distinguish between
a) the belief that "all scripture is inspired by God", that the
Holy Spirit "spake by the prophets" &c and
b) traditional theories about inspiration which involve
inerrancy as to historical & scientific facts, assumptions about
literary genres in scripture, &c.
The description of the idea of inspiration as humanly crafted
comes down much more heavily on b than on a.
> > 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.
I'm the first to admit that there are difficult questions
involved with the idea of the inspiration of scripture. But the idea
that the Bible is a "thoroughly human testimony" means, first, that
there is no way to distinguish between the canon of scripture and other
writings so, so that not only the Gospel of Thomas (as with the Jesus
Seminar) but a whole variety of apocryphal texts, gnostic documents &c
have as much claim to be "thoroughly human testimony to the authentic
human experience of the presence of the Sacred" as anything in the NT -
& from there anything goes.
N.B. I am NOT saying that for Howard "anything goes" but there
is nothing here to keep one from going off in any direction one's
experience seems to take one. One purpose of a doctrine of inspiration
& a canon of scripture is to provide some boundaries.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
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