Well, anytime someone places Moses's comment on the table, I always raise a David or Solomon in response. ;)
Wormwood, first off, there is a reason you stuck out for being on the team here and post #10 is pretty much the logic in a nutshell. Well said. I agree heartily with what you said there and folks you'd be very wise to pay attention to what he said. I personally think he nails what the Bible says on this subject.
With that said, I see a tendency to split the Bible up to say one thing or the other. Following on to what Wormwood said earlier, there are a couple points I want to make. Just because Moses and Paul said they were not eloquent or plain spoken, does not necessarily equate to this being an absolutist notion that Moses was not at all eloquent nor that Paul only spoke simple plain language. Paul himself was quite the scholar, having studied under the preeminent scholar of his day, Gamliel. Moses benefited from the life in the elite upper class of his day, and it followed that he would have had excellent schooling and probably knew a thing or two in a society that would have taught rhetoric, etc.
It is ultimately a matter of the heart. The reason I mentioned David and Solomon earlier relates to their obvious gifting in writing poetry and wisdom literature. They are brilliant eloquent at the inspiration of God.
The reaction to this was what is called fundamentalism. The first fundamentalists were certainly kin to modern fundamentalists, but they were a bit more cultured and perhaps not quite so hostile in at least some ways. There are some excellent resources out there on this movement, so I won't rehash, but fundamentalism went from being more of a strain of Christian intellectualism to a bunker mentality.
At issue is the entire Biblical hermeneutic. In previous eras, the argument had been over viewing Scripture through the lens of tradition. The Enlightenment brought the concept of viewing Scripture through reason. (Note that I skipped the in between which would have been the Reformation - which I view as a hybrid of emerging reason but still rooted in tradition.)
Now, we have the Bible as viewed through science. It's a question of authority because suddenly things are being rewritten. Thus, we have the notion of the stories in the Bible being mythic or exaggeration, the concept of Jesus not performing miracles, etc. All of these ideas germinated through reason and science, with the lens of one or both being used to view Scripture.
I am not here to declare science and reason evil, but we should be careful. Genesis is not a science textbook. What I mean by this statement, is that there are currently inexplicable little details that are not empirical and observable detail. There are precise and imprecise statements. There are also little nuggets and nuances of things like the word yowm, for day, being used for day (Genesis 1:8), the daylight portion of the day (Genesis 1:14) and then for a period of time (Genesis 2:4) that looks to mean more than a single day.
At the same time, I caution the urge to read the Bible entirely through the lens of science. If we have an unlimited deity, chances are he will break down the laws of nature as he sees fit to accomplish something from time to time. At the very least, this would not be out of character and serves as the basis for why we are not deists or agnostics.
At the end of the day, the fundamentalists and the scientists/scholars probably all have some things right and some things wrong.
Wormwood, first off, there is a reason you stuck out for being on the team here and post #10 is pretty much the logic in a nutshell. Well said. I agree heartily with what you said there and folks you'd be very wise to pay attention to what he said. I personally think he nails what the Bible says on this subject.
With that said, I see a tendency to split the Bible up to say one thing or the other. Following on to what Wormwood said earlier, there are a couple points I want to make. Just because Moses and Paul said they were not eloquent or plain spoken, does not necessarily equate to this being an absolutist notion that Moses was not at all eloquent nor that Paul only spoke simple plain language. Paul himself was quite the scholar, having studied under the preeminent scholar of his day, Gamliel. Moses benefited from the life in the elite upper class of his day, and it followed that he would have had excellent schooling and probably knew a thing or two in a society that would have taught rhetoric, etc.
It is ultimately a matter of the heart. The reason I mentioned David and Solomon earlier relates to their obvious gifting in writing poetry and wisdom literature. They are brilliant eloquent at the inspiration of God.
I don't want to gloss over this, because I think it an important point. There was a full-court press in the early part of last century (and the centuries prior) in terms of Modernist thought that came into Christianity.
The reaction to this was what is called fundamentalism. The first fundamentalists were certainly kin to modern fundamentalists, but they were a bit more cultured and perhaps not quite so hostile in at least some ways. There are some excellent resources out there on this movement, so I won't rehash, but fundamentalism went from being more of a strain of Christian intellectualism to a bunker mentality.
At issue is the entire Biblical hermeneutic. In previous eras, the argument had been over viewing Scripture through the lens of tradition. The Enlightenment brought the concept of viewing Scripture through reason. (Note that I skipped the in between which would have been the Reformation - which I view as a hybrid of emerging reason but still rooted in tradition.)
Now, we have the Bible as viewed through science. It's a question of authority because suddenly things are being rewritten. Thus, we have the notion of the stories in the Bible being mythic or exaggeration, the concept of Jesus not performing miracles, etc. All of these ideas germinated through reason and science, with the lens of one or both being used to view Scripture.
I am not here to declare science and reason evil, but we should be careful. Genesis is not a science textbook. What I mean by this statement, is that there are currently inexplicable little details that are not empirical and observable detail. There are precise and imprecise statements. There are also little nuggets and nuances of things like the word yowm, for day, being used for day (Genesis 1:8), the daylight portion of the day (Genesis 1:14) and then for a period of time (Genesis 2:4) that looks to mean more than a single day.
At the same time, I caution the urge to read the Bible entirely through the lens of science. If we have an unlimited deity, chances are he will break down the laws of nature as he sees fit to accomplish something from time to time. At the very least, this would not be out of character and serves as the basis for why we are not deists or agnostics.
At the end of the day, the fundamentalists and the scientists/scholars probably all have some things right and some things wrong.
