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

Doug said: *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.*
**
This is the assumption I want to in some sense challenge: how do we know
what the OT writers, and just as importantly their ANE predecessors and
contemporaries, understood as "factual" within their own cosmologies /
cosmogonies?

*

*
On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 9:05 AM, Douglas Hayworth <haythere.doug@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> 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 09:54:57 2008