i wonder if anyone is interested in doing a little bit of collaborative writing.
i'd like to build a decent essay to respond to the common call of compromiser, churchian etc. with the idea of reposting it everytime some YECist uses the term.
here is my first draft
the issue of AiG's churchian appears to be the 'you only have to repeat a lie often enough for some people to believe it'. so i'm looking for good essays on the topic, links to put into the essay and people who would like to contribute. maybe we can get a nice informative piece and post it everywhere the accusation of 'compromiser appears'
....
i'd like to build a decent essay to respond to the common call of compromiser, churchian etc. with the idea of reposting it everytime some YECist uses the term.
here is my first draft
This charge of compromiser, accommodationist, concillatory, to AiG's favorite label of churchian, is an interesting one.
Partly a debate technic, partly a way to immunize people against thinking. As a debate technic it is the error of poisoning the well, the idea is to paint your opponent as being so wrong, so off base that the very thought of actually dealing with the ideas he/she proposes is unthinkable. As an immunization technic it is designed to enable people to catagorize people quickly, maybe in the first few lines of an essay as compromisers so that you can safely and in good conscience just skip the rest of the essay because you just know that there can be nothing there for you to interact with.
As a technic of debate they are truely functional, for they save time and energy in not even interacting with opposing viewpoints, but if in fact your position is partly true, or that you are interested in learning, these technics stink. For they limit your intake of things contrary to your position and give you a false confidence that all the right people believe similiar things to what you believe.
As a Christian who struggles with these issues all the time, for i dont work at a job because these things interest me and demand my time for reading and study. I am amazed that people who call themselves Christians seem so afraid to read the book of nature and have that study influence their hermeneutics in any way. The relationship of the Scriptures to the rest of the world's knowledge is a little like the relationship of faith to works. As the best analogy of faith i know of, compares faith to an eye, for an eye alone is the organ of sight, but yet any eye on a table, alone, doesn't see anything. The Scriptures alone present us with the only path to salvation, for they are God's revelation to us concerning redemption. But the Scriptures alone, by themselves on a table are silent. Even worse the attempt to read the Scriptures, by ourselves, without helps is bound to lead to serious and complete failure if not gross heresy. Simply to understand the words requires dictionaries, to find similiar passages requires concordances, to visualize Jerusalem requires maps and historical texts. To understand Egypt and Babylonian requires historical,archeological science....well you get the point. Scripture alone leads us to God, but it is not alone on our desks nor in our minds, for it is surrounded and embedded in a framework of language, culture, commitments, knowledge, values, worldview etc etc .... Just untangling this Gordian knot is a lifetime of study.
This is not compromise, this is not concillatory, this is required wisdom. This is part of our task as believers to rightly interact with the Word in the World. The issue is authority and pre-eminence not interaction.
And this is the issue of the creeds. I can subscribe to the Westminster Confession as containing the body of doctrine as taught in Scripture. Which is exactly the promises made by my ruling and teaching elders (i'm PCA). the framework interpretation takes the days as 24 hours, but they have no historical or scientific content, only a literary form to organize the chapter to present a particular set of ideas, not biological nor physical science. The creation report and subsequent discussion effectively modifies the WCF to allow our elders to subscribe in such a way. But the YEC in the denomination will not allow this solution, but are pressing the issue on subscriptionism, and may very well divide the denomination in this way. Sadly it stems from this use of radical polarization to put everyone into one of two boxes; YEC or compromisers with atheistic materialist scientism.
Not only is it sloppy thinking,or worse as argumentative and debate technics become divisive, but it doesnt do justice to the idea of general revelation. This is God's world, certainly sin is a dark veil that blinds people to the truth, but no where in Scripture are we to believe that Satan so blinds Christian's eyes that they are blind to the realities of the world. And this is why the YEC attack OEC and TE much harder than they do scientism, for the testimony of the OEC and TE BRETHREN is that God has used some form of evolution to create this world, both living and material. And the fact that these people sit next to you in the pew on Sunday morning, worshipping the same God as do you is the reason for the compromiser label. The YEC must stop people from looking at the issues because their position can not stand on its own, on the facts, on the issues, it can only be a drawing of firm lines, a division that keeps out the voices.
To me this is sad, for it is the value of not-reasoning over reasoning, the value of not-studying of not-learning over scholarship, the value of emotion over than of intellect. But mostly it shows the value of appealing to emotion and unreason to form, build and sustain political and social movements even among people who ought to know better.
the issue of AiG's churchian appears to be the 'you only have to repeat a lie often enough for some people to believe it'. so i'm looking for good essays on the topic, links to put into the essay and people who would like to contribute. maybe we can get a nice informative piece and post it everywhere the accusation of 'compromiser appears'
....