Re: Firmament and the Water above was [asa] Re: Slug

----- Original Message -----
From: "Glenn Morton" <glennmorton@entouch.net>
To: "'Paul Seely'" <PHSeely@msn.com>; <dfsiemensjr@juno.com>;
<asa@calvin.edu>; <Philtill@aol.com>
Sent: Saturday, June 17, 2006 3:03 AM
Subject: RE: Firmament and the Water above was [asa] Re: Slug

> George M. interestingly asks:
>
>>Are you really unable to distinguish between "wanting" the Bible to be
>>factually false and being willing to accept that some parts of it are?
> Whether you agree with the latter position or not, it is just >not the
> same
> as "wanting" falsity.
..................
I omit all your irrelevant answer. You are trying to tell us what we "want"
in terms of your own experience without bothering to listen to us tell you
what we want.
Unless you have a lot more qualifications in remote psychoanalysis than I
think you do, you have no business telling us that what's in our heads isn't
what we think is there.

Of course I can only speak for my own thought proecsses & motives but I
suspect that the following is true of a lot of others who would endorse some
form of concordism.

1) I started out WANTING concordism - i.e., for biblical accounts to be
true in their historical essentials, the same sort of thing you're arguing
for. Here's a case in point, which is minor in content but illustrative.
Back in junior hi or high school (it's been a long time) I came across an
account of a German archaeologist who had found buildings in Egypt whose
bricks were made without straw. This was cited as proof of the truth of the
biblical account in Exodus 5. I was impressed: If the Bible is true in
that minor detail them we can have confidence in it. Every once in awhile I
remembered that & I think cited it a couple of times in discussions with
skeptics. It wasn't until I was in seminary 20-some years later, reading
Exodus carefully for my Pentateuch class, that I realized the fundamental
flaw: Exodus doesn't say the Hebrews made bricks without straw, but that
they had to get the straw themselves (v.7).

Questions about whether the guy really did find bricks without straw &c are
beside the point here. The reason I cite this is to show that I WANTED the
biblical account to be historically true - not "just theological" truth as
you might put it but observationally historically true. I.e., it is simply
false that I didn't WANT the account to be true in your sense.

2) That was in the past, you say. Today I supposedly don't want the Bible
(& early Genesis in particular) to contain historical truth. Wrong! I have
always said that there are reasonably accurate historical narratives in
scripture and that the fact that the biblical witness is concerned with real
history is important for its message. & I think that in all our
conversations I've said that early Genesis probably has pieces of genuine
historical & geographic data.

3) It would be accurate to say that I don't NEED early Genesis to have any
particular amount of accurate historical narrative but that's a very
different thing from saying that I don't WANT it to. If I didn't WANT it to
I would automatically resist any attempt to demonstrate that there is such
concord. You may get the impression that I do that because of my rejection
of your speculations but that's because that's all they are, speculations.
They are not concords of biblical accounts with verifiable historical events
(i.e., with your "Noah" story, not just the Mediterranean flood, & your
"Adam" story, not just human-ape common ancestry). It is not that I don't
WANT any historical accuracy, it's that I think your candidates for such
accurate accounts are completely implausible. & again the issue is not
whether or not I'm right about that but what I think.

4) Having seen so many concordist attempts for early Genesis contradict one
another, reduce to pure speculation, be internally inconsistent &c, I'm
naturally not eager to drop everything & pursue every attempt that some
conservative Christian comes up with. That is not a matter of not WANTING
any such attempt to be true but just of recognizing the limits of my own
mortality. At my age, with other tasks that I think important, should I
really spend my time investigating every amateur attempt at "a new
interpretation of Genesis 1" &c?

4) Note that in all the above I am talking about truth in the sense in
which you understand the term - i.e., propositions which can be tested by
observation. This does not have to do with any distinction between
historical & theological truth.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/

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Received on Sat Jun 17 21:23:34 2006