[Magdalen] A useful approach to the Bible

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

​Looking at him from the perspective of today, I find Hooker's opinion
unconvincing. For that day, it's not at all surprising.  I think that
today, knowing what we know about scripture, it has lost some of the pride
of place it had back in the day. They had just begun to rediscover Greek
and Hebrew in the West, and they still did not have the King James Bible.
In Hooker's day, most scholars believed scripture was all handed down
somehow from God.
Today scholarship demonstrates that scripture is a human production,
through and through. We know today far better than Hooker ever could have
what the actual content and meaning of scripture is.

Holding that scripture is somehow entitled to some mystical authority seems
incredible when it contains material that shows it to be -- in those
locations -- the words of humans and certainly not at all the sense of the
Eternal one.

And I really think we are here looking at matters that are far more
compelling than merely things where you have one opinion and I simply have
another.

No, when scripture says it is appropriate to smash children's heads on the
rocks, that refutes utterly any claim to divine inspiration. And that is
merely one of dozens of such howlers.
This is not a discussion where it is just a matter of opinion. We are
talking numerous texts which, were they not hiding within the protection of
the scriptural canon, would surely be universally be called inappropriate,
if not despicable and horrendous claims and actions.

In his introduction to his book, _Who Wrote the Bible?_, Richard Elliot
Friedman gives names and dates in a history of the development of the
modern view towards scripture (pp. 15-32). One thing which becomes clear is
that at the time of Hooker, virtually everyone assumed the Bible was simply
god-given. It would be centuries after Hooker before Biblical scholarship
came to the conclusion that many hands produced the text that has come down
to us, and any illusion of inerrancy has been dashed. Hooker knew nothing
of what was learned in the centuries following him, just as the King James
Version is unable to benefit from the knowledge of language and history
unearthed since the companies ceased their work in 1611.


​

James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy

On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 11:54 AM, Ann Markle <ann.markle at aya.yale.edu>
wrote:

> Once again, this author says it's "hard to find what's most important
> [scripture, tradition, or reason]," when Hooker was abundantly clear that
> scripture comes first and foremost, interpreted through the traditions of
> the church and human, scholarly, (not fly-by-night opinion, making
> scripture say what we want it to say or dismissing it completely) reason.
> I'm not sure how this attitude got perpetuated -- perhaps it's the image of
> the "3-legged stool," which must have legs of the same length -- but this
> is incorrect.  When the writer gets his premises wrong, it's hard for me to
> credit anything about the article.
>
> Ann
>
> The Rev. Ann Markle
> Buffalo, NY
> ann.markle at aya.yale.edu
> blog:  www.onewildandpreciouslife.typepad.com
>
> On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 8:34 PM, James Oppenheimer-Crawford <
> oppenheimerjw at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Found an article that resonated with me, and thought it deserved a bit
> > wider distribution. I apologize for the tinyurl, but the actual url for
> the
> > site takes up a lot of space. Patheos has thought-provoking articles. But
> > the way they link it all together yields huge-inormous URLs.
> >
> > http://tinyurl.com/ne7fdy8
> >
> >
> >
> > James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
> > *“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
> > except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy
> >
>