Re: [asa] An Evangelical Manifesto

Quoting David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>:

> You might be interested in reading about the Wesleyan Quadrilateral of
> "Scritpure, Tradition, Reason, Experience." It doesn't come directly from
> Wesley but is based on his work. Even here, scripture remains the normative
> authority for faith and life; the other sources form a lense or matrix
> through which we can understand the Bible.

This is the crux of the "nature/Scripture" relationship for a friend of mine. I
don't think he has any problem accepting that other things contribute positively
to human knowledge along with Scripture. BUT, he is sensitive to which one is
considered the higher authority. His red flag is when we say that science (or
nature, culture, whatever) are the lenses through which we view Scripture. But
he would say (and did --almost in these exact words, I think) that Scripture
should be the lens through which all those other things are viewed. I.e. he
sees this "lens" as the controlling position which should be occupied by the
most authoritative thing --Scripture. Now, I know that we can't even get to
Scripture, let alone interpret it, without first going through many of these
other things. As we've noted before we can't humanly do anything in a vacuum.
At the same time, I think that we DO view science through a lens of Scripture;
hence our correctives against some of the attempted metaphysical assertions from
 militant Scientism.

I guess he is just sensitive about any authoritative hierarchy of relationship
whereas I think most of us see it as more complementary and are quite willing to
accept that church/nature/science... can all have potentially corrective effects
on *our understanding* of Scripture without then violating any principle of sola
Scriptura.

(You can accuse me of shooting at the hip on that term, because I was. --I
haven't read the literature about it and was inferring its meanings from the
context. I was originally just anticipating that this clarification would be
needed for some of us without necessarily thinking it to be a millstone in the
manifesto.)

Thanks for the Galileo quotations, Rich. Those are insightful, though I think
we would nuance it a bit more carefully now. We tend to make a straw man
argument about the literalists: that they woodenly apply their hermeneutic to
everything --like God having hands, etc. Most educated ones are more
intelligently selective about it than they are given credit for, even if we
disagree with the extent to which they still apply it.

--Merv

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Received on Fri May 9 11:43:31 2008