Taz writes:
In this thread, I offer a compromise. What if the Bible is literally true and yet the details can be less than literal ..... What do you think?
Religious Jews and scholars of that time did not have the scientific knowledge that we take for granted, so they did not think of the world in scientific terms or descriptions. Instead they attempted to conceptualize the world in terms of what they knew, as we currently do, and usually described it visually. Generally speaking, not much has changed ...
Understanding this takes nothing away from the revelation of the God's Word in scripture. It simply acknowledges that authors are children of their days, and that views expressing and depicting the makeup of the spirit and flesh are at the mercy of perception. One describes experiences in ways one can, in the times one lives. One understands them in the same relative way.
Perhaps we are called to recognize and respond to the incarnated Word of God in scripture. It may be only then, in the recognition and response, that scripture becomes the living and active Word of the God.
Let me address the issue of literalism from one perspective. This view sees scripture as a pliable witness by a living community of faith invested in the God’s Self-revelation in history. That is, scripture records the witness of the living community of faith invested in the God and His Work in the world. As authoritative scripture for the community, the God also uses that witness to reveal himself to future generations, at the same time that those future generations may also encounter the God in new ways at new points in history. This affirms a very dynamic view of scripture as well as the God’s actions in the world, and rejects the reductionist portrayal of scripture as the absolute Truth and paradigm for everything that we want to know, including past history (ie. The Flud).
In other words, the God and His Truths are innately inerrant; our perception of His scribes perception ... not so much.
There is no reason for scripture to end with the new testament authors, as the living community of faith has not ended. Scripture is simply the witness that the living community of faith has borne to or about the God's revelation; a joined effort between humans and the God focused towards uniting the spiritual and the biological worlds. It captures moments in history, and explains them as well as they need be ...
It is, for all intents and purposes, the evolution of reality.
As far as I can tell anyway ...
Take it with a grain of salt.
One Love
Mercy Trumps Judgement,
Love Weary
The Apostle of the Skeptics writes:
"...picture me alone in that room ... night after night, feeling ... the steady, unrelenting approach of Him
whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me."
™ Version 4.2
