{"id":7600,"date":"2012-05-02T10:14:06","date_gmt":"2012-05-02T14:14:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=7600"},"modified":"2012-05-02T10:14:06","modified_gmt":"2012-05-02T14:14:06","slug":"quote-of-the-day-steve-douglas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2012\/05\/quote-of-the-day-steve-douglas.html","title":{"rendered":"Divine Author and Intelligent Designer of Killing Machines?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Steve Douglas has a post on the idea of God as author of Scripture which combined insight with a way of putting things that is simply delightful<\/a>. Here\u2019s a taste:<\/p>\n

To put it bluntly, I am no longer of the opinion that Scripture is layered with a special coating of \u201cwhat God meant\u201d sauce; neither do I believe that the Bible is composed of the flesh of human words attached to a divinely crafted backbone. Nor am I enamored with\u00a0Peter Enns\u2019 incarnational model of Scripture\u00a0as I understand it, which is built off of the belief that divine and human authorship overlaps. In short, I have seen no compelling, non-circular reason to maintain the belief that God should in any meaningful sense be considered the author of the Bible. To believe in God\u2019s providential intentions for the Church in the production and canonization of the Bible is one thing; I can affirm as much myself. To credit Him as the publisher might even work. I have sometimes drawn the analogy of God\u2019s purposing of Scripture to that of King James commissioning the translation of the Bible. It occurs to me now that my view of Scripture as the response of humans to divine revelation and inspiration strikes me as fairly well analogous to a\u00a0Festschrift. But God as author? Hardly. And the contention that He was the kind of author who overlaid the glaringly human text with some esoteric meaning recoverable independently of the\u00a0meaning it had to the original audiences and available only to subsequent theologians reminds me quite a lot of the infamous \u201cBible Codes\u201d from a couple years back. It\u00a0sounds even more like Gnosticism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Click through to read the rest of Steve\u2019s post, \u201cJames K. A. Smith on the missing Author in authorial intent hermeneutics,\u201d at his blog Undeception<\/a><\/p>\n

See also the post by Richard Beck comparing the approaches to Scripture of Smith and Enns<\/a> in relation to the subject of evolution. Beck wisely notes that theodicy is a problem for all<\/em> Christian theology and not only an approach that embraces evolution. I would argue that it is perhaps even worse if one rejects evolution, since then one has to (as Michael Behe does) attribute the fine craftsmanship of that killing machine we know as the malaria virus directly to the Intelligent Designer<\/a> \u2013 as just one among many of this sort of invention that raises the problem of theodicy even or perhaps particularly if one rejects mainstream evolutionary science.<\/p>\n

Anyone who thinks that taking a supposedly \u201chigh view of Scripture\u201d makes matters simpler and serious theological problems vanish must not have given much serious thought to the matter. And that is perhaps the heart of the problem: those who extol Scripture seem to be those who are least willing to wrestle with what it actually says and what the implications of what it says might be. In my opinion, praising the Bible while studying and comprehending it superficially doesn\u2019t deserve to be considered a \u201chigh view of Scripture.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steve Douglas has a post on the idea of God as author of Scripture which combined insight with a way of putting things that is simply delightful. Here\u2019s a taste: To put it bluntly, I am no longer of the opinion that Scripture is layered with a special coating of \u201cwhat God meant\u201d sauce; neither […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,43],"tags":[906,1140,2744,4005,4843,5154,5232],"class_list":["post-7600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bible","category-inerrancy","tag-authorship","tag-bible","tag-divine","tag-god","tag-human","tag-inerrancy","tag-inspiration"],"yoast_head":"\nDivine Author and Intelligent Designer of Killing Machines?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Steve Douglas has a post on the idea of God as author of Scripture which combined insight with a way of putting things that is simply delightful. 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