Floodnut said:
Indeed, this is what most puzzles me about TE's "faith." How can TE's reject the certainty of an error-free Scripture and still accept the witness of the prophets and apostles, whose theology is rooted in history, whose experience with God is not the following of cunningly devised fables, and whose exposition of God's will is as often as not based on what He did in HISTORY.
If my doctor is an excellent diagnostician, but lousy at investments, do I stop trusting his medical expertise because he can't decipher the stock market? I don't see any reason we have not to trust the experience and witness of the prophets and apostles because they were not experts in post-Copernican science. I don't see how their absence of knowledge about modern science affects in any way the spiritual wisdom they impart to us.
As for history, it is not so much that their exposition of God's will is based on history, but that their understanding of God's will enabled them to interpret history as the acts of God.
If the authors of Scripture are to help us to know God and to live rightly then the historical basis of their guidance, the historical realities used to illustrate eternal realities also need to be correct.
That doesn't mean that everything they tell us needs to be historical. It is one thing to interpret an historical event such as the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians as the judgment of God on a faithless nation. It is quite another to insist that their use of an ancient flood myth requires the flood to be historical in the face of clear evidence that it was not, at least on a global scale.
If we cannot trust what they tell us about earthly things, how shall we trust them when they tell us about heavenly things.
If they are not expert on earthly things, why trust them on earthly things? But if they have walked with God and seen heavenly things clearly, why not trust them on heavenly things?
How can you imagine that the "place of the earth in the cosmos" has only recently been discovered. The earth is the center of God's universe.
Even on a spiritual level we do not know that, for we do not know if the inhabitants of this world are the only ones God relates to as he does to humans. And it is not the centre of the universe in any physical sense. If it were, the sun, indeed all the heavens, would orbit the earth as the geocentrists believed, and the earth would be stationary.
This idea of an expression of revelation in terms that people of the day could understand is still calling God a liar.
You see, that is what I do not understand. How do you come to this conclusion? If the message of the revelation has not been misrepresented, how is it lying to express that message in the cultural context of the recipients? Why would it be necessary to teach evolution to Hezekiah in order to tell him not to trust in Egyptian allies, but rely on God to deliver Jerusalem? Why would it be necessary to teach the Israelites big bang cosmology in order to tell them not to worship the heavenly bodies as gods?
To me this is an example of what theologians call the condescension of God. God speaks to people in terms of their experience, and knowledge and comprehension. He does not ask them to meet criteria of 21st century higher academic learning before he reveals himself. This is not just true of people of the past. It is true today. God still reveals himself to people of all ages and intellectual capacities, to children, to the mentally handicapped, to the uneducated and illiterate, as easily (perhaps more easily) than to the academic. He doesn't speak over their heads or demand they be correct about geology before they receive the gospel.
So why would he demand that the ancient Israelites change their world-view to agree with modern science before giving them any revelation? And why call it lying if he permits the biblical authors to express that revelation in the pre-scientific concepts familiar to both author and reader?
It is not as if we were too stupid to take such things into account when we apply the text in a modern scientific scenario. We are capable of making the necessary mental adjustments from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe without losing the message conveyed to us by those who assumed geocentricity. We can do the same with other pre-scientific concepts which we now know to be false or at least incomplete.
And TE's imagine that because they misread the "natural revelation" and it seems to be contrary to the Scriptural revelation that to take the Scriptures as true is to make God a liar.
You have never shown that we are misreading the natural revelation. And it is only to a literalist that it seems to be contrary to scriptural revelation. This, after all, is the false charge that creationists continually lay against TEs: that because we do not accept the creation accounts as scientific fact, we are rejecting the scripture as a lie. I can understand why a literalist would think in this way. Because, for you, if the story is not factual, it is a lie, it is worthless, it ought to be dismissed as a falsehood.
What you seem unable to comprehend is that for me, the story is more true, more revelatory, more valuable, more to be treasured for what it teaches when it is not tied to a literal interpretation. So when I read the story this way, what I am appreciating is the truth it tells, and in no way do I think of either God or the human author as liars.