From: Dr. Blake Nelson (bnelson301@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Aug 15 2003 - 10:36:12 EDT
I was having similar thoughts to George's, I would
amplfy them as follows. I have some interlocutory
questions which I genuinely have to try to figure out
Howard's perspective. They are not meant as
confrontational, but merely trying to suss out exactly
what Howard's concerns are and I will much appreciate
any answers he can give.
--- George Murphy <gmurphy@raex.com> wrote:
> Howard J. Van Till wrote:
(snip)
> > (b) Challenging the presupposition that there is
> such a thing as THE correct
> > and authoritative biblical teaching regarding the
> formational history of the
> > Creation or the character of divine creative
> action and accepting the
> > difficult task of developing a perspective, not by
> appeal to an ancient
> > canon declared to represent divine authority, but
> by a rational examination
> > of a diversity of relevant considerations --
> empirical, theological,
> > philosophical, historical -- all recognized as the
> products of thoroughly
> > human efforts to make sense of the grand human
> experience.
It seems that theology, at its best, does exactly
this, with the exception that for the christian
tradition all the other relevant considerations have
to be consonant with the recorded experiences of Jesus
of Nazareth as a real, living person.
The canon of the New Testament, in that sense, is not
some arbitrarily determined set of books, but as I
tried to point out once before is the *best* data we
have available to be able to understand Jesus of
Nazareth.
Can you suggest that there is any *better* data for
trying to understand Jesus of Nazareth? Do you have
disagreements with which documents should be
considered canonical? The process the early church
used to adopt the canon? Or only with the
interpretations that some people make of canonical
material or the philosophical presuppositions they
make in using such material?
If one decides that one's allegiance is not to the
historical person of Jesus of Nazareth, understood to
be the Messiah, then, yes, there is no reason to care
about the canon of the New Testament any more than
something else. The New Testament becomes at best
another data point among many others. If one decides
that one's allegiance is to Jesus of Nazareth, the
documents comprising the New Testament are
irreplacable as data for understanding to the limited
extent we can the nature of God.
Obviously, those data can be twisted and contorted in
lots of ways, but that is also why there is a long
historical, ecumenical tradition (sadly still in
disrepair and also sadly with some current
'ecumenicalism' differing significantly from
historical ecumenicalism). It is an unfortunate
byproduct of the Reformation and some of its
underlying philosophy (as opposed to theology) that
one gets the plethora of interpretations (leaving
aside the rightness or wrongness of any such
interpretation) that have caused the anarchical
proliferation of protestant denominations. What you
seem to suggest is to take that unfortunate byproduct
a step further and cut loose from even the source
documents of the tradition. I don't see that
necessarily as a progressive step.
> > I suggest that (a) has been adequately tried, and
> has failed. I am
> > personally inclined to dig deeper and follow an
> approach more like (b).
>
> Or
> (c) Start from the claim that God has revealed
> himself in the life, death, and
> resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and from that
> standpoint interpret both scripture and
> scientific understanding of the world. This is to
> be distinguished from the following
> approaches.
> i) Starting with philosophical assumptions about
> God's goodness, power, &c
> which - especially in connection with evolution -
> produce most of the traditional
> dilemmas of theodicy.
> ii) Treating scripture as a collection of
> propositions without any internal
> interpretive center.
> iii) Approach (b) above - which, since it finally
> has no fixed point for an
> understanding of God, makes it possible for the
> practitioner to create the sort of deity
> (or non-deity) that he or she prefers.
>
> Shalom,
> George
>
>
>
> George L. Murphy
> gmurphy@raex.com
> http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
>
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