November 24, 2009

Let's Split the Academy!

On the very encouraging heels of Derek’s post:

Science and Historiography can never confirm nor deny the totality of scripture’s claims. Therefore, we need to go ahead and officialize two separate presuppositional tracts in scholarship.

Skeptics have every right to disbelieve parts of the scripture. If I thought the Bible was all a big bunch of crap, I would absolutely spend the rest of my life trying to figure out why the heck things got to be the way that they are. This is just one of many reasons I have total respect for honest Skeptics and for Skepticism properly applied.

On the other hand, Believers are dying for lack of contextual rationalism context and rationality in doing the other things that we do while "trusting" the scriptures. We should accept the claims of the NT at face value, for the sake of argument, and then proceed with a semi-critical historical analysis.

What, from all this, could emerge?

Imagine Believers and Skeptics working together from one side, then the other. Trusting or Doubting the entire NT “for the sake of argument” is an awfully big presupposition, but professionals should be able to pull that off, at least in theory.

What I’d really love to see is a group of honest, logical, historically minded Skeptics with truly suspended judgment approaching the NT from the standpoint of faith “ftsoa”. Which of our traditional interpretations would they question more? Which post-enlightenment conclusions would hold up or fall down?

I would LOVE to find out...

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