{"id":691,"date":"2008-11-18T07:57:49","date_gmt":"2008-11-18T14:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=691"},"modified":"2008-11-18T07:57:49","modified_gmt":"2008-11-18T14:57:49","slug":"a-conspiracy-of-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2008\/11\/18\/a-conspiracy-of-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conspiracy of Silence"},"content":{"rendered":"

RJS writes an excellent post on Jesus Creed<\/a> about the difficulty, in evangelical circles, of dealing openly with the problems presented by Biblical criticism, archeology and the natural sciences.<\/p>\n

I could write about this all day.\u00a0 I think the answer to the question — “is there a conspiracy of silence about ‘problems’ with the Bible” —\u00a0is yes, no, and sometimes.<\/p>\n

Yes — I believe a great many pastors and educators know the problems and keep silent for fear of how their constituencies will react.\u00a0 Look at what happened to Pete Enns and at how his book — a relatively modest proposal in the bigger picture of Biblical scholarship — stirred up a hornet’s nest.\u00a0 There are\u00a0 broods of vipers in the Church who will strike at the first sign of flinching.<\/p>\n

No — I believe a significant, significant, significant number of pastors and educators are living in denial about the problems.\u00a0 In the old “battle for the Bible” paradigm, critical methods were seen as prima facie invalid because they approached the Bible from a paradigm of unbelief.\u00a0 The result is that many have steeled themselves against even hearing and testing the claims of Biblical \/ historic \/ scientific criticism.\u00a0 They’re pretty sure Answers in Genesis has solved all this, and that’s the end of it.<\/p>\n

Sometimes — it seems to me that there are more an more people in evangelical circles willing to take Biblical \/ historic \/ scientific criticism seriously.\u00a0 There are at least here and there local church leaders who remain engaged with trends in the academy (I’m blessed to know some personally).\u00a0 And at the same time, there are some GOOD reasons to subject the conclusions of critics to criticism.\u00a0 So-called “scientific exegesis,” all the rage in secular Biblical Studies, excludes a priori any “real” miracles behind any Biblical text, including the bodily resurrection of Jesus (note that this has noting directly to do with the relation of the Bible to the natural sciences — by “scientific” they mean an exegetical method that precludes the supernatural.)\u00a0 To the “scientific” exegetes, N.T. Wright is a fundamentalist — go figure.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is that IMHO churches engaging the educated and informed young people of today, especially in a North American context, cannot, cannot continue to keep silent or live in denial and claim to be exercising their missional responsibilities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RJS writes an excellent post on Jesus Creed about the difficulty, in evangelical circles, of dealing openly with the problems presented by Biblical criticism, archeology and the natural sciences. I could write about this all day.\u00a0 I think the answer to the question — “is there a conspiracy of silence about ‘problems’ with the Bible” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[31,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biblical-studies","category-spirituality"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-b9","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}