[quote=“Mike_Gantt, post:161, topic:36410”]
Therefore, it seems reasonable to ask: With the coming of Messiah (and His glorious resurrection from the dead) and particularly with the advent of modern science, is Old Testament history thereby rendered obsolete?[/quote]
No.
No.
I am one of a number of people here who would not say this. I do not believe the history recorded in Genesis 1-11 needs to be discarded at all. Additionally, I believe that talking about discarding the history of Genesis 1-11 “in favor of SGH” is a false dichotomy.
I don’t believe the history in the Torah is obsolete.
It is to our detriment if we forget that all things come from God. It is to our detriment if we credit El Nino for bringing the snow to California and ending the drought, and we forget to thank the Lord for his mercy. It is always to our detriment if we forget the spiritual dimension …
OK that doesn’t answer my questions. Look carefully.
“How is it to our detriment if we believe that rain is the product of the evaporation/condensation/precipitation cycle? What is the “spiritual dimension” which we’re missing, which prevents us from understanding properly how rain is formed?”
Yes, but we must be careful not to make sola Scriptura into something that it is not. The Reformers insisted on this principle in their debate with Rome over the source of authority in matters of faith and practice. It was a debate between Scripture as sole authority over the church, versus Scripture, tradition, and church leadership as three pillars of authority. Sola Scriptura has to do with questions of theology, faith, and practice. It was not meant to be used as a tool for judging what is “true” or “not true” about the natural world.
If you try to extend sola Scriptura into all areas of life, you run into serious problems. Scripture interprets Scripture is a principle for deciding which interpretation is more faithful to the overall teaching of the Bible. As far as the natural world goes, misapplying sola Scriptura to that realm creates a closed system.
No, I understood your point, but I don’t think you understood Mike’s. I think the point he was making was more along the lines of what I said about forgetting the spiritual dimension. Perhaps I was wrong, but Mike can clear it up for us.
My version of cultural sensitivity is both more brief and more relevant than the tome you wrote (and reproduced in full below!
The ancients had incomplete and/or erroneous beliefs about the nature of their world.
Sometimes they knew they didn’t know the reality, but they wrote what seemed plausible.
Sometimes they didn’t know they didn’t know.
Whether (2) or (3) above, God’s inspiration of scripture might have compensated for the ancient limits to human comprehension but demonstrably fails to do - regarding an almost endless list of topics:
. Slavery;
. Germ Theory;
. Cosmology of the Sun & Moon & Stars;
. The Firmament;
. Continental Drift;
. Stoning Adulterers;
. The flaws in the Table of Nations (Gen 10);
. Math Errors & Conflicting numbers cited;
. The flaws in which tribes belonged to the 10 Tribes of Israel;
‘5’. To insist that these could not be errors is to ignore the cultural context of these flaws and to proclaim them timeless and perfect - hence the loss of credibility for all future generations for the valid spiritual truths the Bible can still offer.
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I don’t understand how I am extending sola scriptura beyond the scriptura. The question before us is the proper interpretation of Ex 20:8-11; Ex 31:12-17; Gen 1-2. That is, what does each passage say in the light of the other, and what do the three collectively say in the light of the rest of the Bible. In determining the proper interpretation according to sola scriptura, the identity of the interpreter has no bearing on the validity of the interpretation. I don’t see how the subject matter of the verses alters this principle.
Yes I understood what he said. I’m looking for the relevance. As usual he’s talking as if Christians today are forgetting the spiritual dimension by accepting the scientific facts, and therefore ending up with an inaccurate understanding of the universe. But who is actually doing this?
Not only is this not true, it doesn’t have any relevance to the question of who understood the physical universe better, the ancients or us. Remember he’s trying to prove his case for “cultural insensitivity”. Please demonstrate that what he wrote, proves his case.
Because when you have two (or more) interpretations that both appear faithful to the Scripture, it is allowable to take into account extra-biblical information when deciding which to prefer. Protestant theologians throughout the centuries have agreed on this principle. If you will not allow extra-biblical information, from whatever source, to inform interpretation, then you either arrive at an impasse, or you run the risk of accepting interpretations that make sense of the Bible but make no sense of the world around us.
Remember Mike’s hermeneutic consists of reading English translations, assuming they provide all the information he needs, and interpreting the Bible through tradition. So he’s not just confined to Scripture itself.
If I get to the point that I see two (or more) interpretations that both appear faithful to Ex 20:8-11; Ex 31:12-17; and Gen 1-2 in the matter at hand, I think this principle will make for a helpful guide. Until then, however, the problem is that I see no other faithful way to interpret those verses other than that “the Lord created for six days and then rested on the seventh.” There can be no reasonable dispute that this is what the three passages say; the only reasonable question is, “What does that mean?” Few people here have tried to say that it means something other than what it says; those who have, have not been persuasive.
As for the willingness to consider extrabiblical material, it was this willingness - specifically regarding the heavy weight of modern scientific testimony - that led me to BioLogos, and, in the most recent instance, consider what I labeled as the fifth stipulation for MC failure in the OP: namely, planned obsolescence of some or all of OT history. This contingency is easier for me to imagine than that someone will come up with a cogent interpretation of the three passages that blunts the prima facie meaning of the words.
I may need to re-think the term “obsolete” as, for me, it implies a spectrum from “fuhgetuhboutit” on the one end to significant revision on the other. That is, obsolescence does not necessarily mean that the OT history in view would be immediately considered faulty, but that 1) the parts that conflicted with SGH would be re-interpreted to fit SGH, and 2) the rest would be considered true but subject to revision at some point in the future should SGH eventually take positions in conflict with any of them. For example, we are seeing revised interpretations of the historicity of Adam and Eve in the wake of the Human Genome Project. This periodic revising of interpretation is the way things have generally been going in biblical interpretation in the scientific age. Stipulation #5 is an attempt to try to identify a scriptural warrant for this approach.
It has become more apparent in the scientific age, just because the speed of changes in our knowledge has accelerated. But the very first Christian interpreters of Scripture in the Patristic era (100-450) took the science of their day into account, as did every Christian theologian until the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the 1920s. Your approach is actually the more recent one, invented as a tool to battle the “evolutionists” of that era. Unfortunately, the battle lines hardened and only became worse over time.
If we let this history of interpretation prevail over sola scriptura, we will only have instituted a Protestant magisterium to replace the Roman Catholic one.
Such a situation emerges when individuals privilege their own interpretation, but lack a method of testing and validating their interpretation. A hermeneutic without any controls looks like sola scriptura, but is just personal opinion elevated to the level of inspiration.
When you say obsolete, I think of something that no longer matters and is no longer instructive and should be thrown out or forgotten. So I’m never going to say that any of God’s word is obsolete. Even when the tabernacle was replaced by the temple or the temple replaced by Jesus the final high priest, people can still learn about God by learning about the history of the tabernacle and the temple. The directions for building them no longer have the same function as they did for the original audience, and we no longer have the same perspective on the texts as people living in a time when the tabernacle and temple were relevant to daily worship, but their history is still instructive and still points us to important truths.
I think there is a parallel with the narratives of Creation, Fall, Flood, Babel, Job, Jonah, etc. At points in Christian history the perspective on these narratives and their role in worship have been different (i.e. they have been viewed at various points as literal history, whatever that entails.) With the coming of certain areas of scientific knowledge and expertise in ancient literary analysis, we now have different perspectives on the role the narratives should play in constructing our understanding of history. But that doesn’t make them obsolete or negate the fact that these narratives can communicate essential truths about God and humanity.
When Paul talks about the Law in Romans he talks about it like a babysitter that was taking care of the people until something new and better came along. (Gal 3:15-29) I know it’s not perfectly analogous, but maybe in some way, the literal interpretation of OT narratives played a similar role, protecting people’s hearts and understanding from competing ideas, and guiding them to important truths, until a point in history where new knowledge made a different perspective more helpful when it came to that same task of guiding people to important truths. That doesn’t make the OT narratives “lies” any more than Christ’s work made the Law sinful (Rom 7:7).
Mike, the suggestion you made above may be helpful in overcoming your current conundrum. If we talk about the “physical world”, time and space are both physical dimensions. We live in 4 dimensions, 1 (temporal) + 3 (spatial). In Einstein’s equations of relativity, time and space are treated in almost equivalent ways (crucial difference: observers can only move forward in time). In astronomy, there is no practical difference between observing what happened millions of years ago and what happened millions of lightyears away from us (as I’ve made clear on another thread). Also, all physical processes extend over both space and time. If we understand anything at all about the natural world, this understanding has to deal with both space and time. Now, suppose we keep that idea (physical dimensions = time + space) in mind and then take seriously the follow statement of yours, with which I wholeheartedly agree:
In this statement, the “physical” should actually include the time dimension. Moses’ authority would have applied within the world of the original audience (!), in which spiritual takes precedence over the physical world (which is largely unknown in time and space). I have no problems with the Bible operating within the “status quo” of that picture, in order to clearly convey salvation-related matters.
Now, I perceive both YEC and your MC view as arriving at conclusions that stem from inadvertently projecting modern concerns about “physical history” onto the ancient text of Genesis. This is undesirable because, as you said, the ancient audience of these Scriptures was primarily concerned with the spiritual (or “spiritual history”, already linking the spiritual to the time dimension). When we eliminate that particular projection of our “modern” mindset, we can appreciate fully not only the imagery of heavenly storehouses of hail and the spiritual aspects of disease, but also the wisdom and truth expressed in the Creation account and Adam & Eve, without having to “butt heads” with what scientific research can tell us about the natural world (across time and space).