[asa] re: restrained accommodationism

David wrote:
As one small example of this, compare the exchange between Nathan and David,
recorded both in 2 Samuel 7:16 and 1 Chron. 17:14. The wording differs: in
2 Samuel, Nathan says "your house and your king" and in 1 Chron., he says
"my house and my kingdom." This small difference has big theological
consequences: in 2 Samuel, the focus is on David's line, and in 1 Chron.,
the focus is on God himself (Nathan is speaking for God).

The way people claim that things are contradictions or strain their belief
make me wonder how they live in the real world. For one thing, the
expectations are for a degree of literalism not found among honest people.
If two people give the exact same account of what happened to different
policemen - bells go off. The policemen immediately suspect collusion
because people do not see, interpret or remember things in the same way. The
expectations here for the Bible is more appropriate for a seance than for
inspiration.

In the bigger picture, as David mentioned, these are brief accounts. People
say, A disagrees with B - but both could be true. Surely you have all had at
least one extended argument in your life. How many different ways did you
say almost the same thing? And didn't the difference of wording portray
meanings that were evolving as the argument progressed?

And how many times have you had similar events happen in your life with
different people present?

Sometimes the issues noted are irreconcilable differences in accounts. But,
others, which seem to be accepted by large numbers of people as differences,
seem to me to be just natural talk. If I say I went to the mall and saw
David and Susie, I do not by any means mean that the mall was deserted
except for David and Susie. If Sally says that she went to the mall and met
her kids at the same time, this is not a contradiction of my story and it
does not mean that I did not tell meticulous truth - even though I had no
awareness of Sally's presence. Further, if I did see Sally and talked to her
and failed to mention it, this does not affect the veracity of my first
statement.

Another point is that Louisa May Alcott said that a great frustration to her
is that readers would gush over how real certain accounts in her books
seemed and how far out and unbelievable other accounts were. Alcott said
that almost invariably, the believable accounts were fiction and the
unbelievable accounts had occurred almost exactly as she had portrayed them.

I am not a concordist - however I am a Maximalist and I find that my maximum
is far larger than that of many others who find contradictions under every
stone. Do they live in caves? Don't they see similar events unfold in their
lives on numerous occasions? Don't they hear people say similar statements
in different contexts? Don't they hear people expound on previously said
statements?

The writers of the Bible presumably were not possessed or automotons. They
were real people who lived real lives. They said a lot of words and did a
lot of things.
If the stories of Abraham saying Sarah was his sister didn't clearly say
Abimelech and Pharoah, people would probably be claiming that they were one
story which was filled with contradictions.

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Received on Sat Jul 1 11:21:09 2006