Ok, you can tell that I've been working alone at home writing a paper today
because that affords me the luxury of bothering you all by taking breaks
here now and then and shooting my post limit. So, please forgive me one
last trip to the water cooler....
Very briefly, here's what I found fascinating about the Seely-Ross
exchange: it seems to set up "accomodation" and "concordism" as two
distinct and essentially incommensurable paradigms. Reading those two
articles, either Hugh is right, and all the "data" in Genesis matches up
with some "data" from the natural sciences, or Paul is right, and the early
Genesis stories can be considered completely ahistorical. The interesting
thing is that I don't think either Hugh or Paul (I'm pretty sure this is so
for Paul at least as Paul has very helpfully corresponded with me at various
times) would really want to set it up this way.
It seems to me that anyone who accepts a broad Christian statement of faith
like the ASA's must engage in various degrees of "concord" and
"accomodation" depending on the context, sometimes engaging in both in the
same context. Almost all of us would agree that the gospel accounts of
Jesus' death and resurrection must "concord" more or less with events that
actually happened -- as our collective interest in the Talpiot tomb
demonstrated.. And yet, even there, I'd bet we could have a lively debate,
say, about what exactly happened when "the earth shook and the rocks split"
as described in Matthew 26:5.
Personally, the concept of accomodation has been an extremely valuable and
fruitful one for me to learn about. What I'd love to see, though, is more
work that tries to bridge the divide that Paul's and Hugh's articles seem to
represent -- that neither sees a genre like the creation accounts as
presenting "data" to be "harmonized" nor as simply "accomodated myth'
without any historical referent at all; work that is neither accomodation*
ist* nor concord*ist*, but that is wholistically attentive to each
particular text as God's fully truthful self-revelation, rooted in history,
and graciously mediated incarnationally through the agency of human
literature.
Ok, back to trade secret law -- or to dinner.
On 3/16/07, Ted Davis <TDavis@messiah.edu> wrote:
>
> Jon, I don't know whether or not you are an ASA member. If not, please
> consider becoming one.
>
> The latest issue of our journal (not available yet online) has a nice
> article by Paul Seely, who has written many nice articles about
> accommmodation and modern natural history. This particular article, about
> Hugh Ross' concordism, would make for a lively discussion here, esp if
> Glenn
> Morton joins in.
>
> Anyone want to talk about it?
>
> Ted
>
>
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Received on Fri Mar 16 17:17:12 2007
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Fri Mar 16 2007 - 17:17:12 EDT