From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: An open question...
Date: 22 Aug 92 07:27:34 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

jay@oclc.org (Young Jeff) writes:

>a stance though.  Although I am now an atheist, I was raised fundamentalist 
>and to this day think that their position is more consistent than moderate 
>Christianity's.  First, I will acknowledge that my understanding of
>this brand may have been misrepresented during my Fundamentalist 
>indoctrination, and I will welcome corrections.  Moderate Christianity
>strikes me as a cafeteria plan religion.  Choose the parts you like and
>disregard the rest.  For example, how can they read the creation stories
>as myths while Jesus apparently accepted them as historical facts?  Was
>Jesus mistaken?  How does this affect his divinity?

I'm not sure I understand this criticism.  It looks to me like you're
criticizing moderate Christians for accepting the results of normal
historical inquiry.  It looks like you are not a fundamentalist
anymore.  So what do *you* believe about the OT documents?  Do you
believe in the literal accuracy of the creation accounts?  Somehow I
doubt it.  On the other hand, do you think the later parts of the
historical books are purely legend?  That David never lived?  That the
Jews weren't carried off into exile?  That's hardly plausible.  There
is too much archaeological evidence in support of the Biblical
accounts.  It seems perfectly reasonable to me that relatively recent
history would be reasonably accurate (particularly when you consider
that the historical books cite the chronicles of the various kings)
but that earlier history -- which after all would have been passed on
orally -- begins to become more legendary as you get farther back.
You can even see this process happening in American history, though we
have enough records to keep it from going too far.  Why would you find
it odd that Christians would acknowledge this obvious fact about how
people pass on their history?

There seems to be some view that as soon as we acknowledge that the
Biblical authors are normal, the whole Bible becomes useless.  This
isn't true anywhere else.  We understand that all of the people around
us are imperfect observers.  But we still make decisions based on
their reports.  Just because we acknowledge that a certain amount of
legendary accretion took place doesn't mean that everything is a
legend.

The accusation about "cafeteria" religion really has nothing to do
with the issue of mythology at all.  This is part of the
fundamentalist attack on things like accepting women and homosexuals.
It has nothing really to do with the accuracy of the Bible.  Even if I
believed that the Bible is inerrant, and that creationism is true, it
wouldn't necessarily affect the issues about which the "cafeteria"
attack is normally made.  Those issues turn on the question of how we
get moral standards out of the Bible.  The attack is bascially
fallacious.

First, the OT isn't an unambiguous source of rules for any Christian.
I've discussed this in the past, and don't want to repeat the details
again here.  But all Christians acknowledge that many of the rules in
the OT are part of a covenant specific to the Jews.  This
interpretation was taught (though in somewhat different forms) by the
leaders of the early church (as shown in Acts 15) and Paul.  It was at
least tacitly approved by Jesus in his dealings with a Gentile
Centurion and a Samaritan woman.  The fundamentalists are the ones
with the real cafeteria, because they want to claim that a few chosen
rules from Leviticus are still Law while ignoring the rest.

Even in the NT, you have to ask whether Jesus and Paul intended any of
their teaching to be turned into the kinds of eternal law that the
fundamentalists take them to be.  I claim that this flies in the face
of what both Jesus and Paul said.  They both taught in no uncertain
terms about the importance of moral behavior.  But neither of them was
into rules.  I believe the moderate position deals with their
teachings in the spirit that their own writings suggest was their
intention.  I agree that this leads to a more flexible (ambiguous, if
you prefer) set of standards.  But I don't see why you should want to
attack that.  Fundamentalism is more consistent only if there's some
evidence that God wanted to present us with an unchanging, unambiguous
set of rules.  I claim that the nature of Jesus teaching suggests that
this is not the case.  Why is it that he taught almost entirely in
parables, rather than coming as a new law-giver?  I think the varied
nature of the Bible, and Jesus' overall style suggests quite the
opposite: that God intended to provide a good deal of autonomy for
people.

About Jesus' belief in creation.  I frankly don't know what he did and
didn't know.  The problem is that there's no reason to think Jesus
would have gone around trying to correct every possible error.  His
purpose was to show what God is like, and about how people should live
to please God.  But this does not require that he should correct every
idea people had that was scientifically or historically wrong.
Presumably he talked about the sun rising, just as everyone else did.
We can't tell from this whether or not he knew that the earth goes
around the sun.  Even we in the 20th cent. speak this way when
astronomical accuracy isn't essential, just as we ignore quantum
mechanics and relativity when dealing with macroscopic objects that
are not moving at a substantial fraction of the speed of light.
Similarly, I often speak of the implications of the creation account
or the story of Adam and Eve, even though I don't believe in the
literal accuracy of the events.  If Jesus was able to get his point
across using those accounts, I don't see any reason why he would have
been obligated to teach everybody Biblical criticism and evolution.
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