Posted on 08/15/2005 9:18:06 AM PDT by hc87
You're welcome. I was forced to post major excerpts from the commentary because even though I have pointed people to my profile page (click my screen name), many are too emotionally immature to "go there".LOL
Mere men get to "ascribe" to God what attributes He's allowed to have???? Puuuleeeeze. LOL
I have to get to work and don't have time right now to respond to your assertion in any detail. I'll get back to this after bit.
In the meantime, you should carefully read this link and let it actually sink in: Why Bible Critics Do Not Deserve the Benefit of the Doubt
"Sorry, Matchett, but I don't agree with your preferred Biblical "experts". Nor does that disagreement make me "emotionally immature"." ~ malakhi
Really? So what _rational reason_ would you give for not agreeing with these statements, then?:
"Let's anticipate and toss off the obvious objection: "Why did God make the Bible so hard to understand, then?" It isn't -- none of this keeps a person from grasping the message of the Bible to the extent required to be saved; ____where the line is to be drawn____ is upon those who gratuitously assume that such base knowledge allows them to be competent critics of the text, and make that assumption in absolute ignorance of their own lack of knowledge -- what I have elsewhere spoken of in terms of being "unskilled and unaware of it."
And is my observation to this effect justified? Well, ask yourself this question after considering what various fields of knowledge a complete and thorough (not to say sufficient for intelligent discourse, though few even reach that pinnacle, especially in the critical realm) study of the Bible requires:
Linguistics/language -- indeed three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Criticizing the Bible in English is a hallmark of critics, who must inevitably resort to one of several excuses: "The translators obviously thought this was good enough, so that settles it." It never occurs to them to ask why a certain translation choice was made, or to make a critical study of the word in question as needed; in a most extreme case -- veteran readers know to whom I refer -- we have persons who think that it is impossible for there to be any new insights into ancient languages, and will openly reject out of hand any more recent study suggesting a word or words have a more nuanced or different meaning than the chosen English word. It is also ridiculous to assume that even the matched English word can be vested with the same contextual significance as the original word -- any bilingual can attest that there are plenty of examples between languages of words that do not adequately capture all nuances when they are used to translate another word. A reader has added that English itself has changed, not only in the hundreds of years since the KJV, but also in the last decades since the NIV was written (which is the reason there is a new TNIV coming out, and why we now even have word studies on the KJV!).
Literature -- One prominent critic advises people to "read the Bible like a newspaper." That is absolutely the worst advice that can be given for reading any text that isn't a newspaper. The genres of the Bible include narrative, poetry, proverbial literature, wisdom discourse, a treaty (that's what Deuteronomy is, believe it or not!), legal codes, genealogies, biography (that is what the Gospels are!), personal letters and general letters, rhetoric (an art form in the ancient world), riposte, and apocalyptic. Treating each one as a newspaper -- written yesterday and with our own ideas in mind -- is a mistake constantly made by critics who impose their own absurd genre-demands on the text.
Textual criticism -- this is a specialized field of determining the original state of a text.
Archaeology -- a field with many sub-fields of it's own, which may involve knowledge of geography, geology or chemistry.
Psychology -- the study of human behavior, essential to understanding the motives of persons in a text; yet most people do not even have basic knowledge of their own psychology! This aspect is complicated by the variance in human behavior we note in our next entry:
Social sciences -- it is in this field that we have found the most ignorance among critics, and not much less of it in others. It would shock the average pew-sitter to be told such things as that: persons in the world of the Bible did not have what we would call an internal conscience; or that Biblical society was heavily focused on honor, much like Japan's culture. No, most assume that people everywhere and at every time have been pretty much the same. That's one of the biggest mistakes a critic can make.
History/historiography.
Theology/philosophy -- obviously!
Logic -- oh yes -- we know, most critics think they have a handle on this one; but most have done little more than memorize the names of a few fallacies, and then look for them everywhere they go. Sadly this is the one area in which people are mostly "unskilled and unaware of it" -- or else, they presume that this is all they need, and never bother to study in any other area.
Miscellaneous -- I may think of more later, but as a catch-all, for example, you may have to learn a bit about biology (for example, if someone says the Bible teaches wrongly about the ostrich's living habits) or other areas.
Excerpted from:
Why Bible Critics Do Not Deserve the Benefit of the Doubt
http://www.tektonics.org/af/calcon.html
Notice he says "Sacred Scripture" with a direct reference to Joshua 10:13. These are the man's own words.
Beware of holding steadfastly to a particular interpretation of Scripture and/or a scientific model, which may be in error.
Are these your words? This is what I have been arguing about in the first place. I have no problem with this. But I would say many on your side do.
I would say this is much more of a problem for the YECs. They haven't progressed beyond a 4th grade level in their understanding of religion (6000 yr old earth and Noah's ark) or science (monkeys morphing into humans).
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