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Source: (consider it) Thread: Oh, Grow Up!
leo
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quote:
Originally posted by Ender's Shadow:
and consider also the word of Peter in today's reading:
quote:
“Why is it that you have agreed together to put the Spirit of the Lord to the test? Behold, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out as well.”
Acts 5:9 - and Sapphira drops dead.
The book of reflections i use on the Morning Prayer readings suggests that that story is a deliberate parallel with Adam and Eve - they will surely die on the day....

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Gamaliel
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In principle, I'd agree with Ender's Shadow, but might differ somewhat over the details and the examples given.

I think the issue for me is that whilst I do accept and believe that God can work in these ways, the plethora of vague and generic 'words' and the lack of accountability and follow-up acts rather in the way that things work out in the story of the Boy Who Cried 'Wolf!'

It desensitises us to those occasions when God really does do something like this ...

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Ender's Shadow
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quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I think the issue for me is that whilst I do accept and believe that God can work in these ways, the plethora of vague and generic 'words' and the lack of accountability and follow-up acts rather in the way that things work out in the story of the Boy Who Cried 'Wolf!'

It desensitises us to those occasions when God really does do something like this ...

[Overused] Definitely a major issue. Thanks.

Leo - I'm sure it's fascinating that it is a parallel with Adam and Eve; the question is: "Did it happen?"

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Test everything. Hold on to the good.

Please don't refer to me as 'Ender' - the whole point of Ender's Shadow is that he isn't Ender.

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Gamaliel
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Does it matter whether it did or not?

Or whether it happened somewhat differently and the disciples interpreted it the way they did?

Do we believe that Herod was really struck by an angel and eaten by worms and died? Or is that just a first century way of saying that he died of a hideous disease which was attributed to God's wrath?

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Let us with a gladsome mind
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Ender's Shadow
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quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Does it matter whether it did or not?

Or whether it happened somewhat differently and the disciples interpreted it the way they did?

Do we believe that Herod was really struck by an angel and eaten by worms and died? Or is that just a first century way of saying that he died of a hideous disease which was attributed to God's wrath?

Yes it matters because of what it tells us about God: is God just a nice old codger who lets us get away with anything, never acts in judgement in this world, and won't reject anyone at the final judgement. Or is He the 'God of the bible', who DOES act in judgement, in both the age to come and now?

--------------------
Test everything. Hold on to the good.

Please don't refer to me as 'Ender' - the whole point of Ender's Shadow is that he isn't Ender.

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leo
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quote:
Originally posted by Ender's Shadow:
quote:
Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I think the issue for me is that whilst I do accept and believe that God can work in these ways, the plethora of vague and generic 'words' and the lack of accountability and follow-up acts rather in the way that things work out in the story of the Boy Who Cried 'Wolf!'

It desensitises us to those occasions when God really does do something like this ...

[Overused] Definitely a major issue. Thanks.

Leo - I'm sure it's fascinating that it is a parallel with Adam and Eve; the question is: "Did it happen?"

I suspect it didn't.

I don't treat the Bible as a history book but as a story book(s). Stories convey much more truth.

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My reviews at http://layreadersbookreviews.wordpress.com

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Ender's Shadow
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quote:
Originally posted by leo:
I suspect it didn't.

I don't treat the Bible as a history book but as a story book(s). Stories convey much more truth.

OK - so what's your problem with it? Is it that you don't believe in the possibility of God acting like that? What is the basis for that belief? Is it because you want to reject the possibility of God acting in judgement? Or is it that you don't think it is 'likely'? Again, what is your basis for concluding that. Does that arise from the Humean argument that 'I've never experienced it, so it's just a story that some primitives made up?' Or is there a better basis to your approach?

--------------------
Test everything. Hold on to the good.

Please don't refer to me as 'Ender' - the whole point of Ender's Shadow is that he isn't Ender.

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leo
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It isn't a problem. It is a belief about the nature of Holy Scripture as a multi-layered set of texts, as has been taught by the Church for many centuries before the Enlightenment period when literalism crept in.

I could develop this but the thread is about the churches pandering to the immature so it is a tangent here.

--------------------
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Janine

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Pity us poor literalists, bound to certain patterns of behavior by our inconvenient beliefs. [Big Grin]

I have also seen immature "tantrummy" behavior from people who insist adamantly that little in Scripture is to be taken literally, and who wander in to a traditionally liturgical church for their spiritual topoff, rather than a (supposedly) more freestyle (possibly evangalical) setting.

People vary -- and people are very much alike. Depends on what you're getting at.

I've seen people who claim to be totally unconnected to ancient formal worship formats (or at those least a few hundred years old, anyway) -- yet those same folks have set up a concrete Shibboleth out of their non-denom formats for assemblies and study.

It's difficult for a human being to live free. Habits and patterns are so comfortable.

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leo
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quote:
Originally posted by Janine:
Pity us poor literalists, bound to certain patterns of behavior by our inconvenient beliefs.

Well, yes, since you can't eat meat unless it has been slaughtered by kosher butchers - see Acts 15.

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Ender's Shadow
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quote:
Originally posted by leo:
It isn't a problem. It is a belief about the nature of Holy Scripture as a multi-layered set of texts, as has been taught by the Church for many centuries before the Enlightenment period when literalism crept in.

I could develop this but the thread is about the churches pandering to the immature so it is a tangent here.

Let's try again: Theology is a science because it seeks, like the natural sciences, to establish hypotheses about the nature of God from the data that is available. However if you merely deny that the data is valid, then you are able to construct any hypothesis you want. There must however be a basis on which you choose to make your determinations as to what data is valid, and what's not - unless you want to dismiss the possibility of God as an ontological reality at all, or at least adopt the Sea of Faith's position that it is impossible to say anything with any certainty. So Leo - are you adopting that Sea of Faith position - or do you accept that some of the data presented in the bible about God is for real? If so, how do you decide?

--------------------
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Please don't refer to me as 'Ender' - the whole point of Ender's Shadow is that he isn't Ender.

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Janine

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quote:
Originally posted by leo:
quote:
Originally posted by Janine:
Pity us poor literalists, bound to certain patterns of behavior by our inconvenient beliefs.

Well, yes, since you can't eat meat unless it has been slaughtered by kosher butchers - see Acts 15.
Only if it's likely I'll be upsetting someone to whom that matters, someone to whom it matters so very very much that they'll go to hell over my ham sandwich. See I Corinthians 10:25 & context.

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Golden Key
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quote:
Originally posted by Janine:
People vary -- and people are very much alike. Depends on what you're getting at.

quote:
It's difficult for a human being to live free. Habits and patterns are so comfortable.
Yup! [Smile]

Granny Weatherwax, is that you? [Cool]

(A beloved character in Terry Pratchett's books, Janine. PM me if you want to know which ones.)

--------------------
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Gamaliel
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Of course patterns and habits are comfortable, we are wired that way. That's why every single church or tradition we could name has set patterns and habits.

How could it be otherwise?

@Ender's Shadow: I don't see how it makes any odds difference we take the Ananias and Sapphira story literally as to whether we regard God as a nice old codger who lets us get away with everything. It strikes me that if we do take it literally then it raises equally - if not more - difficult questions. For instance, why doesn't God zap TV evangelists and other charlatans who fleece the flock, why does God apparently let any of us get away with our misdeamnours - why haven't you or I been struck down dead 15 times over already ...

As it happens, I do believe that God judges and I do believe in the 'final reckoning' - however that is to be understood.

However, as someone of a literary bent and who understands a little of how narratives and stories, metaphors and so on work then it is clear that there are literary elements in the Book of Acts. It isn't a newspaper report. That doesn't mean that I don't believe it's based on fact, that the people who appear in Acts weren't real historical people nor that Luke is lying when he appears himself in the narrative at times - the 'we' passages.

All I am saying is that Acts belongs to a particular genre, a kind of first-century 'novel' if you like - only 'faction' would be the closest approximation we have today - or something like Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood' - a non-fiction novel. Capote's book was based on real events, of course, but there are still disputes about the actual course of events to some extent - or at least his approach to them.

Is Shakespeare's Richard II historically accurate? No, it isn't. Does it tell us things about Richard II, kingship and power that a 'straight' history wouldn't? Yes it does.

The problem I have with the uber-literalists is that they are treated these texts in a way in which they weren't intended to be taken. They ignore the particular genre - be it Gospel or 'history' (in the Acts and in the OT history sense).

When was the last time you saw someone drop down dead in church? When was the last time you saw an autocratic leader struck down by an angel and eaten by worms and die?

You haven't. What you may have seen, though, are people becoming croppers as a result of foolish actions, leaders such as Gadafi and Ceaucescu deposed ...

And all of it points to 'final judgement.'

Am I making any sense?

--------------------
Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.

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Jolly Jape
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quote:
originally posted by Ender's Shadow

Let's try again: Theology is a science because it seeks, like the natural sciences, to establish hypotheses about the nature of God from the data that is available. However if you merely deny that the data is valid, then you are able to construct any hypothesis you want. There must however be a basis on which you choose to make your determinations as to what data is valid, and what's not - unless you want to dismiss the possibility of God as an ontological reality at all, or at least adopt the Sea of Faith's position that it is impossible to say anything with any certainty. So Leo - are you adopting that Sea of Faith position - or do you accept that some of the data presented in the bible about God is for real? If so, how do you decide?


This all sounds a bit Modernist, ES. I doubt that any of the many practitioners of Theology from Paul onwards as far as sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century would find you definition made any sense at all. Surely, following that somewhat monochrome agenda is exactly the sort of category error that has led to the "Liberalism" of which you are so critical. There is a saying (originating, I think, from some Orthodox saint, though Father G or Mousetheif may correct me) that a theologian is one who prays and one who prays is a theologian. Not true in absolute terms, perhaps, but it does capture an important distinction between theology and natural sciences; that it is essentially relational.

This fact fundamentally alters the evidence criteria employed in the study. There is something more at work than 2+2=4 here.

We must be careful not to stray into the land of deceased equines here, but it is worth noting that the Bible does not claim for itself the reductionist type of truth which you seem to think so important. Everything in the book is true, and some of it actually happened.

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To those who have never seen the flow and ebb of God's grace in their lives, it means nothing. To those who have seen it, even fleetingly, even only once - it is life itself. (Adeodatus)

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Gamaliel
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@Janine

I've been pondering your point, a bit further:

'Pity us poor literalists, bound to certain patterns of behavior by our inconvenient beliefs.'

My take is this, there IS of course, immaturity around on all sides of this one - liberals, conservatives, any-other-approach-there-might-be.

I certainly wouldn't set out to claim that is ONLY 'immature' churches of a fundamentalist flavour that demonstrate these kind of behaviour patterns. Far from it.

What I would say is that it ill-behoves liberals or those with a more nuanced or somewhat 'mystic' approach (I'd put myself more towards the latter camp than the former) to look down their noses on their more literalist brothers and sisters.

Equally, I would maintain that it ill-behoves the more woodenly literalist (and there are gradations of woodenness from spongy corks to rigid planks and fossilised wood as hard as iron) to take a pride in their own ignorance.

There's a vein of populist anti-intellectualism in some evangelical and charismatic circles - and what intellectualism is allowed tends towards the more Modernist and propositional kind that Ender's Shadow has exemplified on this thread. I'm 100% with Jolly Jape here.

Mark Noll is good on this - 'The Scandal of The Evangelical Mind.'

The current evangelical and fundamentalist mindset derives from 18th century rationalism to a great extent - even when it is reacting against it. It's a product of the Enlightenment, for better or worse, just as much as Deism is.

I'm not suggesting that we go back to a pre-Renaissance, pre-Reformation sensibility necessarily - at least not in terms of pre-literacy, pre-democracy and so on.

But I am saying that we need to appreciate the poetic, the 'mythic' (in the true sense of that term) and the mysterious. These things seem flattened out, to me, in the more literalist settings - it can become a 2D rather than a 3D faith.

--------------------
Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.

http://philthebard.blogspot.com

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Lamb Chopped
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It can indeed (as I just had an argument with some idiot who seems to think string theory is in opposition to the Christian faith! [Disappointed] ). But it seems to me that "treating the Bible as a storybook" and falling back on a "multilayered" view of the text is very often used to evade the uncomfortable bits of Scripture. On the Ship, for example, when anybody asks about a difficult/troubling passage, someone else is sure to pop up (within the first four posts!) and dismiss the problem entirely, because "we all know X didn't really write that"/ "it's just a bit of pious fiction designed to teach a moral truth" / "God wouldn't REALLY do that."

It gets a bit old. I understand this is a case of abuse, not use, of the concept. It's just that it's such a freaking common abuse, and it drives me batty when I'm struggling with something and people pop up to airily assure me that I'm making a big deal over nothing.

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Raptor Eye
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quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
It can indeed (as I just had an argument with some idiot who seems to think string theory is in opposition to the Christian faith! [Disappointed] ). But it seems to me that "treating the Bible as a storybook" and falling back on a "multilayered" view of the text is very often used to evade the uncomfortable bits of Scripture. On the Ship, for example, when anybody asks about a difficult/troubling passage, someone else is sure to pop up (within the first four posts!) and dismiss the problem entirely, because "we all know X didn't really write that"/ "it's just a bit of pious fiction designed to teach a moral truth" / "God wouldn't REALLY do that."

It gets a bit old. I understand this is a case of abuse, not use, of the concept. It's just that it's such a freaking common abuse, and it drives me batty when I'm struggling with something and people pop up to airily assure me that I'm making a big deal over nothing.

While I agree that it may be used as a cop-out so that the struggle may be avoided, I can't help but agree that as God wouldn't really do anything contradictory to God's good nature, the alternative credible options are given greater weight.

I've been more inclined, not less, to look closely at uncomfortable bits of scripture in the light of seeing them as true stories which may or may not have happened that way.

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Be still, and know that I am God! Psalm 46.10

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leo
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quote:
Originally posted by Ender's Shadow:
quote:
Originally posted by leo:
It isn't a problem. It is a belief about the nature of Holy Scripture as a multi-layered set of texts, as has been taught by the Church for many centuries before the Enlightenment period when literalism crept in.

I could develop this but the thread is about the churches pandering to the immature so it is a tangent here.

Let's try again: Theology is a science because it seeks, like the natural sciences, to establish hypotheses about the nature of God from the data that is available. However if you merely deny that the data is valid, then you are able to construct any hypothesis you want. There must however be a basis on which you choose to make your determinations as to what data is valid, and what's not - unless you want to dismiss the possibility of God as an ontological reality at all, or at least adopt the Sea of Faith's position that it is impossible to say anything with any certainty. So Leo - are you adopting that Sea of Faith position - or do you accept that some of the data presented in the bible about God is for real? If so, how do you decide?
Theology also examines the data. It doesn't just build an edifice on it uncritically.

I am nowhere near the Sea of Faith position because I am not an unrealist.

I simply, to repeat myself, go with the majority of scholarship and commentary rather than with literalism.

--------------------
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My reviews at http://layreadersbookreviews.wordpress.com

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Gamaliel
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I can see what you're getting at Lamb Chopped, but I'm not sure that this is what I'm getting at here, but I can't speak for leo of course. I'm with him on the majority/commentator view though.

To a certain extent, in the instance that's been given (Ananias and Sapphira) it isn't really a big issue because, to my knowledge anyway, we don't tend to see incidents like this these days anyway.

The onus, I would suggest, is on the literalists to tell us why that might not be the case. Now that would pose them a dilemma ... I well remember earnest charismatics back in the 1980s saying that God would 'restore' to his church 'miracles of judgement' among other things - with Ananias and Sapphira style consequences.

I often used to wonder why they would automatically consider that such 'judgements' would fall on other people and not necessarily upon themselves ...

--------------------
Let us with a gladsome mind
Praise the Lord for He is kind.

http://philthebard.blogspot.com

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Lamb Chopped
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Ho-kay. Don't know if you'd consider me a literalist, but an explanation for why not Ananias, Korah, etc. now is pretty easily found. Paul lists a whole bunch of miraculously-smitten baddies in the OT and then tells us in 1 Cor 10:6 that

quote:
Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did.
Somebody is bound to start yelping about the morality of a God who would use one person's situation to teach another, even many others; but before we get derailed onto that tangent, I'd like to point out that if you DO intend to use the "make an example" technique (right or wrong), you don't need to make many. Do one or two, publicize them highly (say, in a well-read book and oral tradition!) and be done. People will either learn, or not. If one example won't teach them, one million similar examples won't work any better.

Which is why I think we don't see miraculous smitings all over the place today. It's not that they aren't deserved. It's that they'd do no good.

--------------------
Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!

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