Re: [asa] Seely's Response to Hill re: Accommodation in PSCF; ANE Motifs

On 2/26/08, David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The ongoing correspondence in PSCF among Hugh Ross, Paul Seely and Carol
> Hill in PSCF is very interesting. Seely's most recent communication in the
> March 2008 issue (sorry I can't link to it because of our ASA Neolithic
> Internet publication policy -- you can only read it if you have the original
> stone tablets) is well done but I get the sense Paul and Carol are talking
> about almost the same thing with somewhat different words and emphasis.
>

I agree that the much of the difference seems a matter of semantics. I,
like Paul Seely, have always greatly appreciated Carol Hill's contributions
to PSCF, but I found her "Worldview" alternative rather strange. It seemed
to me that she just doesn't like the word accommodation because it sound
like God must somehow subordinate himself to the culture in order to
communicate. But Paul's clearly doesn't use the term accommodation to
mean imply that God is subordinate to humans; he is (I think) just as
Reformed and Calvinistic as Carol.

The Seely-Hill debate implies that there is a clear either/or
distinction between what the cultures believed were literally true. I don't
think it's that clear; facts and story-telling devices are all jumbled
together in those ancient narratives. (In this sense, it is like the
Gospels, in which a theologically constructed narrative is framed using a
mixture of factual events and teachings are creatively arranged and
paraphrased to teach the Gospel message). They OT writers probably did
consider the ANE cosmology to be factual, and the histories they tell were
probably based on what they believed or experienced as events. But they also
clearly felt the freedom to tell the story with certain "poetic license"
since the purpose was more important than to recount "objective" history.
Some specific aspects of these stories reflect literal history and the
author's actual understanding of the physical world, while other aspects
reflect their own numerological/poetical/story-telling styles.

I agree in general with Seely that God's purposes in inspiration were to
communicate theological truth, so he did so in a manner which accommodated
the writer's general understanding of the structure of the natural world and
"factual" events of history.

Doug Hayworth
Rockford, IL

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Received on Thu Feb 28 09:06:56 2008