From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: An open question...
Date: 27 Aug 92 06:32:09 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

jay@oclc.org (Young Jeff) writes:

>What is your opinion of the Documentary Hypothesis.  They have
>evidence that many prophesies were recorded after the fact.
>Not proof of course, but I found it compelling.

I'm not sure I follow this.  The DH that I'm familiar with involves
primarily the earlier historical books.  This is separate from
questions about authorship of the prophetic and apocalyptic books
where your issue is raised.  I generally accept liberal scholarship,
but with large amounts of salt.  That is, I do think the historical
books preserve material from multiple traditions, and I think probably
the DH guys have detected some signs of it.  However I find some of
the detailed allocations of verses and half-verses to various sources
sort of absurd, and I'm not even sure how much I'd be willing to bet
on the details of their schemes of sources and redactors.  I also
don't see any of this as a challenge to the reliability of the Bible.
For me, the presence of material from multiple sources gives us a
better basis on which to judge the amount of variation that was
present in the material, and it gives me more confidence that the
editors didn't impose an artificial uniformity where it wasn't there
in their sources.

About prophesy I take a middle position.  First, as I'm sure you know,
the primary purpose of a prophet was not to predict, but to pronounce
God's will and to say what should be done.  On the other hand, the
prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah did predict, and I think the
predictions were made before the fact.  I believe most scholars do as
well.  The only case I can remember where predictions are often seen
as being after the fact is in Daniel.  I have to say however that it's
been nearly 25 years since I took OT, and most of my scholarly reading
is in NT scholarship.  As I recall, there is a very accurate set of
descriptions of history which suddenly becomes vague, and it seems
likely that that's the time when it was written.  But this pattern
seems to be specific to apocalyptic, and maybe just Daniel.
Apocalyptic is a form of literature I find rather foreign.  However
it's not prophecy in quite the same sense as Is and Jer.  I do accept
the usual scholarly view.  However unless there's evidence to the
contrary, I'm going to assume that putting prophecies into the mouth
of past heroes was part of the conventions of apocalyptic, and that
the people who read it would have realized what was going on.  In more
conventional prophetic works, I would take it for granted that
predictions were written before the events being predicted.

>How do I decide if this is a case of progressive revelation or just
>the advancement of civilization?  Would you claim that the Israelites
>were advancing at a pace that can only be explained by progressive
>revelation?

I claim that in the light of Christ, we can see Israelite society as
being led by God towards a point where Christ's teachings would make
sense.  I'm not interested in getting into arguments about whether
their advance was unique or not, since I think God is at work in many
places.  The judgement of whether the advance was due to revelation,
as the people responsible for it claimed, is one that I find it hard
to argue on any objective basis.  Some things are a matter of
judgement.  This is one.

>Do you believe these records are materially superior to those of
>other contemporary civilizations?

I'm not competent to make this evaluation for the entire history of
Israel.  I do believe that the final product, i.e. Judaism as it had
developed by the 1st Cent, was the most advanced religion in the Roman
empire (before Christianity, of course).  Like the above, this is a
value judgement that I'm going to find it hard to prove in any
objective fashion.

>Why is atheism a bad thing?  Simply because God said so, or is there
>a material reason?

Well, if God exists, atheism is a bad thing because its primary claim
is wrong.  This doesn't mean that no good can come from atheists.  But
I happen to be optimistic enough to think that there's an advantage to
knowing the truth.  It's not the only consideration -- people can know
the truth and not make good use of it, and people can be wrong but
still do fairly well with their lives.  But I do think truth helps.
Xref: sparky talk.religion.misc:15385 alt.atheism:16343