(Return to my home page) : Blog Home : February 2004
Reply to Jewel Graham on the Inerrancy of the Bible
February 11, 2004 00:00
I have written an open letter to the editors of Dawgnet in response to Jewel Graham's recent article. I know Jewel does not have the time to keep this conversation going, but since I teach Bible, I do want to present a different viewpoint and encourage my students to explore these matters further.
The open letter is found at http://blue.butler.edu/~jfmcgrat/weblog/jewel_graham_reply01.htm
Separation of Church and State on Homosexual Marriage
February 23, 2004 00:00
It seems to me that the only way one can effective argue for homosexual marriage in the current climate is to show the issue to really be about the separation of church and state. Marriage, defined as the union of one man and one woman, is a traditional religious definition of marriage. On what basis can one assert that a completely secular union, legalized at city hall, must be between a man and a woman? If, as I suspect, the issue turns out to be about church and state, then the way forward is clear.
Katie Couric Evangelized
February 25, 2004 00:00
Well, we got to see Franklin Graham evangelize Katie Couric on national television this morning. That didn't bother me at all - except perhaps for the underlying assumption that one can make a meaningful presentation of the Christian faith in a 10 second sound byte. But the thing that worried me is something that has begun to worry me more and more as I've seen popular responses to the release of The Passion of the Christ, and to TV documentaries like NBC Dateline: Jesus' Last Week. When asked about the possibility that some elements in the Gospels' accounts were more theological than historical, Graham simply either could not understand or could not acknowledge that a historian views and uses these documents differently than a believer or preacher reading them in Church. One respondent to the NBC documentary said that he would without hesitation choose the Gospels over historians accounts. But such a dichotomy misses the point. It is not about choosing between the Gospels and historians' accounts. It is about different ways of reading the same material. For a believer, the whole story is literally true. For a historian, the issue is what one can prove beyond reasonable doubt. It is the question of how much would stand up in a court of law. In a court of law, and in particular in Biblical law, a single person's testimony is not enough to convict someone. A historian thus will not (and should not) feel comfortable taking a single testimony and declaring it historical fact. Even when there is multiple independent testimony, one cannot speak of absolute certainty - false convictions do happen, and historians sometimes make wrong conclusions based on very strong evidence. And just as an aside, for those who are unaware of this, the Gospels are not independent testimony, but show clear signs of having known each other's writing. If there is one good thing that I hope may come out of this movie's release, it will be more exposure to the methods and practices of historical study of Jesus, and how it differs from the devotional ways of looking at Jesus that many are familiar with from Church. It is not that one is 'better' than the other. But they are different approaches, and they are both useful, and rather than antagonism, each should ideally come to understand the rationale behind the other's way of reading the same documents.
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