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Questions Week 4 Day 2

by David Joynt on May 22, 2017


DAY 23

2 TIMOTHY 4:1-4

 

 

The fundamentalist fear of “higher criticism” of the Bible is really a fear of historicism. Historicism is the idea that all ideas are merely cultural artifacts and only cultural artifacts. For an historicist, trying to understand historical texts includes, inevitably, an act of interpretation, that brings the world of the interpreter and the world of the original writer together. Since the interpreter is himself conditioned by his own culture and understanding, and ancient culture can only work by a complex reconstruction, meanings derived from ancient books are tentative, provisional, incomplete, and conjectural.

 

The fundamentalist recoil, rightly, at historicism, fearing that the truth of scripture will fluctuate with academic fashion or disappear in unresolvable disagreement. Refuge is taken in adherence to theories of how inspiration must have happened, and why the text of the Bible must be both literally true and infallible.

 

 

Do you have doubts or fears with respect to the authority or clarity of the Bible?

 

 

How do you resolve them?

  

FAMILY TIME—

Talk to your children about why you love the Bible.

Tags: fear

About the Author
David Joynt

Dave Joynt began his service as a pastor at Valley Presbyterian Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona in September 2014. This meant a move away from the Northeast, where he has a long history, growing up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and then serving congregations in Delaware and New Jersey for a total of 23 years.

Dave was nurtured in a great church in Bethlehem where his parents, Anne and Carey, served as elders. He graduated in classics from Lehigh University where his Father taught, and then from Oxford, where he met his wife Julia. Ordained in 1988, he completed a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1993.

He and Julia have a son, Tristan, and a daughter, Madeleine.

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