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Letter to my pastor concerning "The Truth Project"

Postby Ben2747 » March 28th, 2008, 2:56 pm

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Postby postodave » March 28th, 2008, 8:20 pm

The term literalist or literal reading is misleading. Clearly modern fundamentalists do accept that there are figures of speech in the text but plain reading is if anything worse; it implies that scripture has to mean whatever popped into my head the first time I read it. There is some value in the term intentionalist for then we have to ask what did the original author or authors mean. Now this has its own problems. Lewis himself made some well known criticism of intentionalism in literature but he also says that when we try to take scripture literally, meaning to refer to a six day creation and so on, we are probably reading in a meaning that the ancients never even imagined (or intended).

I think an alternative approach might be to ask the question 'Can we get scientific information out of scripture'. Augustine was convinced we could not. Newton and Galileo both thought we could though their interpretations were not literal and seem to have been proven wrong. Fundamentalists think we can but when they read something which cannot be taken according to its apparent meaning like Joshua commanding the sun to stand still or Christ going up to heaven they tend to fudge and say the plain meaning is now not what people thought the plain meaning was 500 yrs ago. (the catholic church condemned Galileo, Luther according to the table talk argued on the basis of Joshua that geocentricity must be wrong)

Having said that I want to suggest that there is a controlling relationship between scripture and science but it is not of the kind fundamentalists suppose. What scripture can do is to give us a perspective which enables us to see the meaning of a theory in a different way. So whereas an atheist may see evolution as a process without meaning a Christian can see it as the way God has worked out his purpose. In the late nineteenth century there were some protestants who went as far as to say evolution is just Calvinism applied to biology. But of course some Christians with a different understanding of God would say evolution shows God to be more hands off than we had once thought. I would say we bring the philosophical or religious ideas we already have to the scientific theory. So if our religious understanding derives from scripture we will interpret scientific theories in a scriptural way. Therefore if we want to try to determine whether the twentieth century idea of a hands off God is more scriptural than the Calvinist idea or whether the truth lies somewhere between the two we will have to look to scripture not to theories because our theories always presuppose a religious perspective.
So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
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Postby alecto » March 28th, 2008, 8:38 pm

It does seem like "plain reading" so defined, is in fact a lot like just taking "literal" to mean using the dictionary definitions of the words except in the case of metaphor. Even if we accept "plain reading" as different and significant, however, we get into two problems:

1: If we use our language to do anything, we have to take non-scriptural information (e.g. how sentences are constructed, what words mean, etc.) to interpret scripture, i.e. to find out what the "plain meaning" is. Why is this any different, really, than using geology to find out what the plain meaning has to be?

2: How do we determine where metaphorical langiage ends and begins? sqrt[-1] quoted the phrase "six normal earth-rotation days", but there are verses in the Bible that don't seem to be metaphorical in style that would preclude there being such a thing (e.g. God stopping the sun for Joshua). The normal method for distinguishing metaphorical from non-metaphorical language is via a criterion of impossibility. If I say "that man is a real bear" I am lying or using a metaphor, because no men are bears. Thus we say the sentence is metaphorical. It would seem to me (and I think St. Augustine uses the same kind of rule) that we therefore conclude the six days in Genesis are metaphorical because anyone competant to tell the age of the earth will know it is far older than that, just like most people know that no man is a bear.
Sentio ergo est.
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Postby postodave » March 28th, 2008, 8:52 pm

That's very well put Alecto. But it does raise the problem of when something is plain to us but would not have been plain to the authors of scripture. The idea of the sun stopping or the dead being under the earth or heaven being above the sky may not have been problematical to them but they are to us. What does that do to the idea of intended meaning? Does it mean a passage can be intended by its authors to mean one thing and intended by God to mean something else? So the author thought quite literally that God had a right hand but also had a more figurative meaning in mind yet it was the more figurative meaning that God intended. I suppose there is a difference between a meaning intended by God which has nothing to do with what the text says (as in those rabbinic interpretations based on numerology) and a metaphorical sense which is closely linked with, indeed central to, the writers intended meaning as in Jesus sitting at God's right hand. The writer may have thought God had a right hand but it was not essential to his meaning.
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But the lamb ran away with the crown
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Postby mitchellmckain » March 28th, 2008, 9:53 pm

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Postby sqrt[-1] » March 28th, 2008, 11:37 pm

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Postby postodave » March 29th, 2008, 12:26 am

So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
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Postby sqrt[-1] » March 29th, 2008, 3:43 am

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Postby postodave » March 29th, 2008, 10:29 am

So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
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Postby sqrt[-1] » March 30th, 2008, 5:53 am

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Postby postodave » March 30th, 2008, 10:14 pm

So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
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Postby postodave » April 1st, 2008, 8:42 am

Just wanted to add this link from the Christians in Science site. Mitch I think you will like this:
So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
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Postby nomad » April 2nd, 2008, 4:02 am

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"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best -- " and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.
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Postby mitchellmckain » April 3rd, 2008, 12:05 pm

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Postby postodave » April 3rd, 2008, 10:04 pm

So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
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