Thomas said ...
...Thomas, you have given me pause.
Careful, old chum. Start thinking like that, and the next thing you're slipping into the back of the church ...
My approach comes from my belief that the Bible was written by mortals, and react accordingly. If I understand your (his) quote properly, the question asked is why not, for the sake of discussion, accept that the material is divine. And proceed from there.
If I were James, addressing you personally, I perhaps might say "the question asked, for the sake of discussion, is can we accept that the authors of Scripture, despite their mortal creatureliness, were working under divine inspiration?"
Part of me feels that accepting facts not in evidence and moving on from there is inappropriate. If the foundation is weak, anything one builds on top of it has little support.
I agree, but then I suppose we differ on how we read the evidence.
I think the RC position is quite nuanced:
To search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to "literary forms." For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse. The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture. For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another. (Dei Verbum, III, 12, 2)
By 'quite nuanced' I mean, this opens a can of worms.
We do not regard the Bible as inerrant, and the literary forms are so varied it's impossible to make a simple statement that defines them all. You have books of mythology and history, of prophecy and eschatalogical speculation, of proverbs and collections of saws and wisdoms, insights and inspirations; books of songs, psalms and prayers; you have testimonies of witness, letters of exhortation ... all markedly different genres, produced at different times, in different places, by different people, across centuries.
We argue that the
sitz im leben, the 'setting in the life of the people', is itself evidence into the inquiry into what the text is saying to us.
But I have to admit that my facts are no more in evidence than are his. And therefor my suppositions are not built on any more solid a foundation than his. Yet I accept as valid the scenario from my point of view, where I do not from his point of view.
That, I think you'll find, is a question of faith, not science. Our respective viewpoints are founded on reason and logic, not empirical evidence.
But I think we are both obliged by the evidence to agree that, taking the New Testament,
something happened. I think the current consensus is that the person to whom we commonly refer to as Jesus Christ actually existed, that He preached to the people, that He performed wonders, and that He came to a mysterious end is now beyond doubt, but the questions remains, and always will, as to whether He was, in the words of C.S.Lewis, 'mad, bad or the Son of God'.
This rather smacks of being a bit unfair on my part. I need to ponder this some more…….
Welcome to the theologians' world!
I quite like James' last sentence:
You see that the existential facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the value; and the best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never confound the existential with the spiritual problem.
The way I read it is, the better adepts of higher criticism are aware of the limitations of their science, and so should we be.
I can only point again to the words of Paul Ricoeur, who sees a demarcation between critique (the existential fact) and conviction (the value). Philosophy, metaphysics, theology is a dialectical discourse between critique and conviction. (Indeed, it would seem many of the empirical sciences have reached such limits that they, too, must acknowledge this dialectic.)
