Another case of egregious plagarism. The above cited phrase was taken from another website without citation.
What are a few of your favorites?
Favorites of what? Where are you going with your question?
Old Testament scholars.
Which part of the OT? Two of the most preeminent scholars I lean on are Jesus and the Apostle Paul as the best commentators of the OT. Jesus was the closest to the OT since He was God and created all things. And apart from his schooling with Gamaliel, Paul also learned from Jesus and wrote significant works on the OT under inspiration of the Holy Spirit in defense of salvation through Christ alone and grace alone. He also settled on the Scriptures as final authority and the lens through which to view God’s work in creation and redemption. He, Jesus, and Peter attested to the final authority of all of Scriptures. Any other scholars I may cite depends on the articles I write and publish. I have cited hundreds of scholars both Christian and non-Christians depending on my topic. So tell me about those you cite in your publications or personal writings.
Again, I ask, what is the purpose of your question?
Tough to beat Jesus and Paul, though Jesus is unpublished, though often referenced. You were just critical of Walton, so thought you must have some you liked.
I’ve just been catching up in this thread and what you wrote here has been my strongest impression. I’m more used to hearing online atheists use this strategy to disparage anything to do with the sacred or religion. Makes one wonder how far this person would advocate extending his style of argumentation.
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To be clear, is your position that ANE settings and writing did NOT have influence on the Torah?
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He is also fairly conservative.
It’s regarded as fairly certain these days, no longer considered radical. Where he goes a bit overboard is saying that that first Creation account isn’t about physical creation.
Though it just struck me that I don’t know if he gives any credence to the “royal chronicle” aspect – I should contact him and ask.
True.
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Your general argument is out of touch with reality. Though I just skimmed it.
If Greek culture did not influence Paul why did he use the term “ Tartarus “ in 2 Peter 2:4? That was from Greek faiths and was a place below hades.
Also it never says inspiration in the Bible. It says “god breathed” and we interpret that in many ways. One way is inspiration but inspiration does not equate to the Holy Spirit possessing a prophet hikscking their free will as they go into this sort of automatic writing trance like state.
When an apostles was writing scripture do you believe they had free will to write what they wrote or do you think they lost free will and wrote what the spirit forced them to write?
God did not seem to take issues with the other nations because of polytheism, the belief in many gods, since God themself said “ God of gods “ and so on. Seems the were more of a monolatry practicing community than monotheistic.
If writing was just from the spirit why does one say eye for an eye and another say turn the other cheek? Did God change his mind on what was ok or did humanity get it wrong because kd the hardness of their heart and if faith accommodated the hardness of a heart why not accommodate their lack of wisdom about the natural world?
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Pete Enns also has an entire book out on this subject.
Tim Mackie is interviewed here by BL.
Tons of resources on BL too by just searching inspiration.
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The sanctimonious sola scriptura prohibitions to biology which make their regular appearance here, are summed up by Piet Hein’s Circumscripture verse
As Pastor X steps out of bed
he slips a neat disguise on:
that halo round his priestly head
is really his horizon.
There is no arguing with dogma, that is why it is called dogma. In a way, I get the appeal of a hermetically sealed bubble where one simply does not need to engage with outside reality. That is a reassuring and self-consistent framework. If that is your choice, peace be on you.
But my experience is that literalists who are convinced of their theology of creation soon stray from their cloister and attempt to create an alternate scientific account of nature, and that is the morass of misrepresentations, lies, caricatures, false equivalencies, and sheer nonsense, begins. Because reality, as observed, measured, and studied, is not beholden to theologians.
The trouble is that theologically driven apologetics has no actual interest or curiosity about the processes of nature. There is no real desire to gain insight as to how stars form, the development of life, or the fundamental principles which yield our world. All that threatens the dogma. Science, the tool which brings understanding of the universe and wellspring of our technology, becomes heresy to be rebutted. Once some rhetorical response is concocted, apologists are done and out of there. For my part, I would rather not live in a cave.
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This is an excellent point from that podcast:
But what’s happened is that the human role in the production of the Scriptures I think, has been unnecessarily minimized and sidelined. And so I sarcastically call this the golden-tablets-falling-from-heaven view of the Bible. In other words, the assumption is for the Bible, for these texts to really be a Divine Word, the human role, the role of human agency in the origins of these texts needs to be minimal or downplayed in some way to highlight God’s role.
I’ve heard it referred to as “textual docetism”, the idea that the scriptures are so totally divine that they only have the appearance of being human literature. And we see that attitude here fairly often.
This struck me since I was just listening to a lecture by Michael Heiser where he made the point that no one takes Genesis literally, everyone just chooses to take some literally and some not. So the argument isn’t about whether or not to take it literally, it’s about how much to take literally.
The only way to know what to take literally is to get into the head of the writer. We can only do that by asking what kind of literature he chose and what worldview he had and what culture he was part of, and from there figure out what his writing said to his original audience. And as Tim Mackie points out, the better you do that the more the scriptures actually come alive.
Very true. Science is only even looked at as a way to try to bolster the apologist’s view of the scriptures, which makes for bad science and bad theology because it treats the scripture as a possession of the apologist who has to defend it , which to a thinking listener conveys the message that God can’t defend His own revelation. The route to take, then, is what Michael Heiser recommends, to just let the scriptures speak and not worry about proving anything about them.
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Please define “literally” versus non-literally from a literary context. Prior to engaging an argument as this, a person must define the terms applied. Otherwise, one engages the danger of devolving into faulty logic.
Really? Do you realize that you are engaging in apologetics for your position with what you wrote? Please define “apologetics.” What other “driven” apologetics then is valid? Why is theological driven apologetics one that “has no actual interest or curiosity about the process of nature?” How does theology not show an interest in or curiosity about nature? When I read my Bible, I see all sorts of interest in nature in it, especially from God. Please elaborate on your statement.
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YECists I’ve known will go to great lengths to pretend they don’t think that God over-ruled the writers’ will when in effect that’s how they treat scripture.
The two are in accord: both point towards being merciful. The first does so because it limits payback to no more than the original injury; the second presumes they got that part down and says to further increase the level of mercy.
So God didn’t change His mind, He just moved the lesson to the next stage. Scholars have noted that “an eye for an eye” was a definite move forward relative to the surrounding peoples (with Hammurabi a noted exception). The prophets take up this theme, arguing for the principles behind the Torah, an approach Paul makes use of in the New Testament. Since the principle behind both statements is to increase mercy, the two statements are in agreement.