Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Aug 20, 2021 8:20 am
To scientifically interpret any human creation you need to know the creator's motives.
Secular scientists would be astonished to hear you say this.
However, I would agree: you need to know the Creator to understand the Creation fully...particular its moral and teleological dimensions. However, secular scientists would be appalled at your suggestion. They would insist all one needs is an empirical test.
True, some of The Bible can be read as poetry.
Yes. It has several literary modes: wisdom literature, poetry, epistle, prophecy...and each book has to be understood in light of its intention. But this has never presented any sort of difficulty to any serious exegete.
Biblical testimony purports to be about truths. However The Bible also contains unwitting testimony about its authors, editors, and the cultures of belief they inhabited.
Those are two different issues. To say that a text has cultural elements is a claim about
form; to say it has truth-value is about
content. And while these two have some interchange, they are also importantly distinct.
One can couch something
factually true in cultural
language without doing it any violence. One example from Western culture would be the phrase "the four corners of the Earth." In literal terms, we might cavil that the earth is a globe, and so has no "corners." But anybody with even a modicum of cultural wit realizes that the old idiom refers to north, south, east and west, and so does not suggest that 17th Century Western mariners thought they were going to fall off the edge of the world. So we have to read sensibly, intelligently, in a well-informed way. By contrast, there is a kind of cynicism that is itself entirely naive.
A
sensible reader can make sense of cultural expressions. A
naive reader cannot, perhaps, but that's a fault of the reader, not of the text.
