Re: Let's start with the assumption that I am right!

I'm going to focus on just the most important (right now) of the 3 points I
made & your response.

----- Original Message -----
From: <glennmorton@entouch.net>
To: <glennmorton@entouch.net>; <asa@calvin.edu>; "'George Murphy'"
<gmurphy@raex.com>
Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2006 1:38 PM
Subject: Re: Let's start with the assumption that I am right!
............................................

>2)Â The belief
>that God accomodated the inspiration of scripture to current cultural views
>of
>science, history &c need not (& I think should not) be left just as a
>brute fact or as a way to avoid embarassment. It should be understood as
>an expression of the divine kenosis, slef-limitation, that took place in
>the
>Incarnation. I don't know if you were reading the list when I mentioned my
>recent article "Couldn't God Get It Right?"Â It's at
>http://www.elca.org/faithandscience/covalence/story/default.asp?Copyright=06-03-
15&Author=murphy&Pages=1Â .Â
>This is a very brief discussion but I hope gets my point across.
>Â

Maybe it shouldnâ?Tt be left as only a way to avoid embarrassing
conclusions, but for the
life of me, I canâ?Tt see any other reason it is used. Why? Because it
isnâ?Tt applied to
the existence of the Roman empire. No one goes and talks about how Roman
history was
accommodated to the poor historical knowledge of the early Christians.
Accommodation is
only applied when someone doubts that the Bible is telling us historical or
scientific
fact. Can you name one instance of accommodation being applied to anything
we know is
historically correct?

1st, you completely ignore the point that the accomodation of scripture can
be based on a more fundamental theological claim. I know that you have
little respect for theology & theologians but unfortunately that's what
we're talking about right now - theology. You're simply in the wrong
classroom.

2d, "accomodation" simply means that in the process of inspiration God
allowed the biblical writers to use the contemporary understandings of
science, history &c to the extent that it didn't obscure important aspects
of revelation. That's the case regardless of the degree of accuracy of that
history. When the contemporary understandings of history &c were pretty
accurate then the biblical accounts of the history &c were pretty accurate.
The succession narrative (II Samuel 9-20 & I Kings 1-2) is "accomodated" to
the knowledge of the events in questions of some (as is widely thought)
eyewitnesses of the events in question & is probably quite accurate.
Whether or not people usually call this "accomodation" is irrelevant.

I'm afraid I don't know what your sentence about Roman history means.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
 
Received on Sat Jun 3 20:13:21 2006